The piece below is a first draft of a segment of a memoir I am writing, of
Norwich from the end of the war to the present day, and will take in the various
collectors and dealers I have come across in the last 50 years, mixed with other
personal memories. I will probably publish it on this site, and may eventually
have it published, either as book or articles.

~

NORWICH

I was born into a world of fury. In a small corner, of a
small island, a small city was being blitzed and burned by German bombers; not
because it was important, but as part of a world wide insanity that saw our
small city as part of a monstrous strategy conceived by a madman. And in one
small part of that 1000 year old city of 100,000 inhabitants, half a mile
outside the broken remnants of the centuries old city wall, that had stood firm
against all incursions for 700 years, but now encircling a cowering city,
helpless against the brutal onslaught from the skies, lay a warren of Victorian
terraces, pubs and corner shops; and in one of those small, four room houses, I
first began my journey to, and exploration of, a world of such profound and
wondrous fascination that even now, a lifetime later, I am still trying to
understand its meaning, and grasp its impalpable essence.

A black sky laced with white beams of light, restlessly
searching; a distant-thunder rumble of engines high in the darkness; the musty
smell of hessian sacking and damp blankets in the semi-submerged shelter in the
back garden, with its two rows of bunks and kerosene lamp – these may be trace
memories, or recollections of stories told, and films seen, mixed with post war
explorations of that same shelter that remained, submerged and weed enveloped,
for some years. But however fragmentary my memories of the blitz might be, the
shattered city that I emerged into, at Wars end, blinking and stumbling as I
tried to make sense of this immense new world, is still as clear and sharp as it
was when I first saw it in those austere, grey, but wonderfully exciting post
war years.

The heart of Norwich that existed within those broken
walls was a medieval warren of streets, alleys and yards; mouldering half
timbered buildings leaning over dingy streets, and poverty stricken tenements;
street corner pubs and shops; stone and flint churches, warehouses and builders
yards. But as well as the sprawling evidence of poverty and , amid the detritus
of the centuries old neighbourhoods, vibrant communities existed; and at its
heart a bold and proud city centre which told the story of the centuries in one
panorama of disparate , incoherent buildings. The centrepiece was, and is, the
angular art deco City Hall, built and dedicated a year before the war began,
just in time to defy the bombs that rained down in those first years. Its bold
front steps overlooked a market that had existed since Norman times, which was
itself fringed by a row of splendid Edwardian shops and banks, and an arcade
whose mosaic and decorative extravagance spoke of the confidence of a time
before the first of the great wars that devastated a nation and a city. From
those same steps the market was flanked on one side of the square by a flint-
built, fourteenth century Guildhall; and on the other side, the great church of
St Peter Mancroft, built in the fourteenth century, and the last resting place
of the eminent Sir Thomas Browne, and many other locally celebrated worthies,
whose names and deeds have faded with their inscriptions on the melting stone.
Looking further from the city hall steps, over the variegated awnings of the
market, beyond the Edwardian pride etched into the imposing buildings of
Gentleman’s Walk, piercing the skyline as it has for 900 years, is the elegant
power of the Norman Cathedral, the equal of any in the country, and to its
right, above the foreground buildings, is the immense man made mound that
supports the square, stone faced, castellated majesty of The Castle, the
arrogant edifice that has overlooked the city from its humble anglo saxon
beginnings, nine hundred years ago. To the east of the elegant sweep of Castle
Meadow could be found the open space that was ringed by the cattle market on one
side, the huge porticoed central post office, and the multi-roomed three storied
Victorian edifice that was the great hotel, all of them overlooked by the winged
Victory monument that celebrated the Boer War. This open space led into the
great sweep of the boulevard of Prince of Wales road, flanked on both sides by
impressive Victorian town houses and finishing at the ornate Victorian train
station.

Elysian Fields

This was the Norwich that I began to explore in those
post war years, but a Norwich reshaped by the bombs into something less formal,
but infinitely more exciting. Our lives were given form by many things; school,
home and family most obviously, but also by the wonderful open air playground
that Norwich had become: the wreckage left by the war was our elysian fields;
our “playing fields of Eton” were the wondrous bomb sites that fired our
imagination, and fulfilled our fantasies. We Blitz Rats were occupied all our
spare moments by exploring the crumbling walls, rubble strewn spaces and hidden
cellars that now became ours, while the rest of society passed by, oblivious to
our activities, while they painfully, and happily, slowly, rebuilt their world.
I have no memories of any serious injuries suffered by any of us – not for want
of trying as my Mother would probably have said – as we climbed broken walls to
bedrooms reduced to charred joists jutting out beneath empty windows, recreating
the latest pirate adventure 15 feet above the broken ground; or lowering
ourselves carelessly into underground caverns through fractured floors, and
exploring the echoing basement that was the only remnant of a factory or
warehouse otherwise blasted into oblivion.

The best of these was at the junction of Dereham Road
and Barn Road, flanked by remnants of a much earlier age, the old city wall,
which then consisted of a length of flint wall with two or three Norman style
entrances that used to stand beside the long gone St Benedicts Gate, one of the
main entrances into the fortified city. To climb to the top of this notoriously
unstable wall, in full view of passing adults, was beyond the aspiration of
most, but some of us took on the challenge, although the better option was
always the bomb site itself, which was ours, and ours alone. The great advantage
of this particular site was that it was directly across the road from my local
cinema, The Regal, a beautiful little provincial cinema, built in 1937, and
mercifully, from our point of view, spared the bombs. We could leave the cinema
Saturday mornings, our imaginations still aflame with visions of Roy Rogers,
Hopalong Cassidy, Lash Larue, or the ridiculously glamorous Buster Crabbe of
Flash Gordon fame, and shoot, blast, punch and generally obliterate ourselves
and each other as we galloped, flew, climbed and dived over mesas and canyons,
alien landscapes and hostile environments of all kinds, that we found perfectly
represented in the blasted landscape of a war, more real to others than our most
vivid fantasies, but of which we knew nothing, and cared less.

Such was the cornucopia of destruction that was my
heritage, that The Regal bomb site, although only a short walk from my house,
was by no means the first encountered on my journey. The first was in retrospect
the most horrifying, because of the possibilities of disaster it represented.

My house was in a maze of Victorian terraces; a few
houses one way was a tiny crossroad, on each corner a staple of life; two pubs,
a general store and a butchers, the baker was round the corner beside the
general store. That way lay school and grandparents, important in their own way,
especially to the adults, but uninspiring to young imaginations. A few houses
the other way however, and I would reach the great thoroughfare that was Dereham
Road: turn left and the way was clear to the wondrous metropolis that always
beckoned me. Before I reached that gateway to discovery however, I only had to
go three houses along before I came to a gap in the terrace, a charred and
broken gap, a missing tooth in a madman’s grimace, a reminder of the horror just
passed. An incendiary had fallen directly onto the house and it had burned to
the stone floor, quite capable of taking the whole row with it, but mercifully
contained. This was the great fear of my father, trapped in an invalid’s bed a
few yards away, and at the mercy of any fire that took control. We could go to
the shelter, but the difficulty of carrying him there , and then getting him in
, posed so many difficulties that he chose to stay in the house, often kept
company by my brother who sheltered under the table, as they watched the glow
through the one dirty window, and probably prayed. He was a brave man who bore
his terrible affliction with grace and good humour, but he was afraid of the
fire, my Mother told me this years later, and suffered fears and torments that
few people experience. Such was the war, and the legacy of the war, as I will
discuss later, that we blitz rats never knew about, and so never let temper our
delight in our world of fantasy.

This sombre relic was again utilised by us for
recreation, although its proximity to home meant that we never felt free to do
much more than the always pleasant pastime of leaping from a broken wall onto
the unsuspecting back of the more easily bullied member of the gang, and sending
him headfirst into a pile of rubble. Big Tony was the usual recipient of this
treatment, as he was a big target to hit, was somewhat slow witted and
uncomplaining, and sported a purple birthmark that covered half his face, a sure
sign of victimhood to our unforgiving eyes. He suffered further humiliation at
my hands, when, playing behind a low wall at the barbers on the corner of West
End and Nelson street, I threw a stick into the street at an approaching
cyclist, with the unexpected, but definitely gratifying result of seeing it
lodge in his front spokes and throw him over the handlebars. The enormity of
what I’d done soon calmed my excitement, and we quickly scurried away, leaving
my victim groaning semi-conscious in the street. On the short walk home I calmed
my fears of retribution by persuading a bemused, but frightened, Big Tony, that
he had been solely responsible, and would undoubtedly go to prison. “What will
my Mum say” he wailed as I left him at the alley leading to his back door; I
shrugged, to indicate that you reap what you sow, and went home whistling.

The only other memory I have of Tony was when we were
sauntering up Dereham Road and approached the second of the bombsites that led
to the city. This was partially utilised as a wood yard at the time, and
therefore afforded even more opportunities to cheat death as we clambered over
dangerously swaying piles of sawn planks. On this day however we had no thought
of the wood yard, but were stopped at the entrance by a mousey middle aged man
in a grubby raincoat. He asked us quietly if we would like to see something
interesting, which seemed to two bored boys a reasonable offer on a quiet day.
We looked at each other and said “OK”., then followed him into the stacks of
wood, where he stopped, turned round and opened his raincoat. We regarded his
unremarkable member with some bemusement as we realised that this was the
“something interesting” we had been promised; it was of no interest to us and so
we exchanged glances, then turned and walked back to the road. Once clear of the
yard, Tony was immediately indignant “when he said something interesting I
thought he meant chickens, or maybe rabbits, not that”. I sagely concurred that
chickens, or even rabbits, would have been far more interesting. And so we
ambled away, again aware that adults were a strange species, but un perturbed,
and un perverted, never to mention it or think of it again.

Adelaide Street

16 Adelaide street was a four room terrace house, with a
narrow enclosed passage running from the street to the back yard, narrow enough
for me to be able to straddle the opening and walk up the wall by the time I was
seven or eight. The back yard was shared by our neighbours, the Browns. Mr Brown
was a grime encrusted coalman, a fearsome taciturn character to my eyes, and to
whom I never spoke. Their only son Georgie, although a couple of years older,
was a best friend, but only in the back yard, he never shared our adventures in
the outside world, nor joined us at the pictures. We spent most of our time in
the back yard, and rarely visited each others houses; one of the few times I
remember being in his house, we sat in a corner of the small living room,
playing shops with our strips of plastecine, while his parents say round the
wireless listening with rapt attention to a new programme called "The Archers".
It was not a programme we listened to in our house, and only increased my
feelings that the Browns were somewhat different, and somehow connected to the
countryside, a world beyond my ken; my tastes were more attuned to "The Man In
Black", classic ghost stories narrated with sepulchral relish by Valentine Dyall,
whose doom laden rendering of Bram Stoker's "The Judges House" haunted my
imagination for years. Yet another unforgettable moment, in a childhood of such
moments, that helped create the obsessive collector I am today.

George was a serious boy, well read in adventure
"yarns" as he called them, and possessing scientific facts gleaned from his
magazines that brooked no contradiction. He probably regarded himself as my
mentor, but I teased him without mercy, deliberately breaking the formal rules
he set up for our games, to his eternal chagrin. One particular game involved
the ever present water pistols, which on this occasion were used in an assault
on the outside lavatory, a pair of which stood a few yards from our back doors.
I was defending my lavatory from the inside, while he attacked it by attempting
to fire over the gap at the top of the door. Although trapped I had the
advantage of a ready supply of water to refill my gun. Georgie insisted that, as
an absolute rule, I had to fill my gun from the cistern, and not the lavatory
pan. I quickly agreed, and just as quickly ignored him; Georgie's rules were
there to be broken after all, that was the point of them to me. He would
probably never have realised my treachery, had I not popped above the door while
he was approaching and caught him full in his open mouth with a splendid shot. I
dropped down again and listened to him spluttering and coughing: "Are you sure
you're getting that from the cistern?" he demanded, "it tastes funny". I was
laughing too much to answer, and, unsurprisingly Georgie lost interest in the
game, and went indoors.

Beyond these was a narrow overgrown garden that led to a
wall that was the boundary of The Model School, a Catholic preparatory school
for girls, that had an imposing wrought iron entrance gate on Dereham road, but
whose playground at the back shared a wall with our back garden. I spent many
happy moments precariously clinging to the top of the wall as I watched the
girls shrieking and giggling as they took their break, or, most delightfully,
when they had their netball lessons in their dark blue bloomers. I was painfully
shy, and so dropped back immediately if they spotted me. The only other reason
for going into the garden was to visit the large overgrown gooseberry bush, with
its lethal thorns, but gorgeous, ripe plump fruit. We didn't have much in the
way of fresh fruit in those days, and the gooseberries, although not to
everyone's taste, were a joy to me. The large green berries, with their veins
and tiny hairs, were only for the bravest; as you bitinto them the tough
outer skin gave way with a satisfying crunch, and our mouths were flooded with
the sharp acidic juice, that brought tears to our eyes, as we struggled to
maintain a straight face, before collapsing into satisfied giggles. The real
treat was finding the later, ripe berries, purple and soft, with an incomparable
sweetness, that I remember to this day, although, strangely, I can't remember
eating one since. Georgie's adjacent garden was a more formal affair, with two
rows of wooden sheds that housed rabbits and chickens. Geogie took great
pleasure in letting me watch when his father decapitated a chicken, then let it
flutter and stagger headless for a few horrifying moments. With a working
father, the Browns lived well with their chicken dinners - but they didn't have
a gooseberry bush.

I have fond memories of George, and that tiny back yard.
It was a large part of the only world I knew for a number of years, along with
the streets and bomb sites. A few feet from our back door was the wash house,
dark and chilly, with a large stone sink, and not a place I had much time for.
Beside that were the pair of outside lavatories, useful for much more than the
usual purposes, as related above. My brother Michael, seven years older, and far
more knowledgeable and sophisticated than I, would hang on to the door, and
swing backwards and forwards yelling "The Bells!, The Bells! - they made me
deaf". I was overwhelmed with laughter and admiration, even though it was some
years before I saw Charles Laughton perform the same trick as "The Hunchback of
Notre Dame", and more years later that I climbed the tedious steps to the real
bell tower at Notre Dame in Paris and contemplated the great bell "Jacqueline".
As I stood with a few other visitors, silently contemplating the massive bronze
artifact, I had before me an imperishable image of a creaking wooden lavatory
door swinging to and fro with a twelve year old boy attached, shouting his
incantation to the skies. Thus reality, memory, fantasy and imagination combine
and merge to create a new surreal reality that adds colour and texture to the
everyday ; thus we collectors and enthusiasts collect more than artifacts, we
collect memories and dreams which we weave unconsciously into the commonplace,
to add texture to the ordinary, and give potential for everyday to be a new
discovery.

The Thing on the Stairs

David was one of the ragged urchins that infested the
Adelaide Street neighbourhood, part of our loose knit gang, but no especial
friend of mine. On this particular day however we somehow found ourselves alone
on the streets, as we wandered with our ever present sticks, idly slicing the
heads off any front garden flowers we could reach, as we wandered past rows of
unremarkable terraced houses, looking for something to relieve the boredom. We
found ourselves finally out of our familiar neighbourhood, across Old Palace
Road, and into a maze of Streets, less than half a mile from our own, and nearly
identical, but far enough away for us to be anonymous, and therefore with more
licence to attempt exploits that we had to be wary of in our own streets, where
we could be informed upon to parents, ever looking for an excuse, it seemed to
us, to fly into a rage, and impose irksome restrictions upon our freedom.

We noted with increasing interest that a number of these
terraced houses were apparently empty, abandoned even. The few yards from the
gate to the front door were sprouting weeds, with sometimes a large cobweb
attached to the door itself. This wasn't necessarily conclusive proof of no
occupant , as front doors were not always used in those days; I personally
never saw our front door opened in all the years I lived in Adelaide Street, it
was common practise to use the back door at all times. The back doors in the
terraces were always accessed by way of a narrow passage every half dozen or so
houses, which would lead to the backs of three houses either side, all enclosed
in their own back yards. On this occasion we were looking for evidence of
neglect, no curtains, and no light or movement inside; and in that long, empty
street, on a grey autumnal afternoon we found the perfect site: a pair of houses
with weed encrusted fronts, peeling paint on doors and windows, an abandoned
cooker barring the way to one front door, and a grimy sack covering half of one
window. Through the dirt-encrusted windows there was no sign of life, as they
stood lifeless and abandoned, relics of war time displacement probably, and
merely waiting for the inevitable bulldozer when the clearances finally began
some years later. What made these two dilapidated properties ideal, was that
they stood on either side of a passage, and so gave us perfect privacy as we
entered it. David was reluctant at first, but my enthusiasm persuaded him that
an adventure beckoned with no consequences; I was normally fairly cautious, but
that day I could see no downside to what had to be an activity that would
produce a great story when we met up with the others later. And so we slipped
into the gloomy passageway.

All the passages echoed, and this was no exception, our
steps rang in the narrow enclosure, but there was no other sound, no voices, no
movement, the houses were ours, and ours alone . At the end , as we came back
into the light, a wooden fence enclosed the tiny back yard on our right, while
on the other side the yard was open, and filled with foot high weeds, and a
wheel less pram abandoned on the back step, further proof that nothing lived
here. The fenced-in back yard was the obvious one to explore, as it gave
complete privacy, and meant that the ever anticipated shout of outrage from a
dangerous adult could be forgotten. The wooden fence was about 5 feet high, and
falling apart, but the gate was intact, although leaning dangerously on its
hinges. We looked at each other - David wasn't sure, but my excitement had
infected him, and so we carefully pushed on the gate. It stuck at first, as it
was resting on the ground, but a more determined shove forced it forward two
feet, with a hideous grating sound that caused the first, but not the last,
shock to my nervous system that day. We stared wide eyed at each other for some
seconds, and at that point could easily have run back to the street. There was
no reaction from the eerily silent world around us however, and as we calmed
down, the partially, but sufficiently, opened gate seemed to invite us in.
"C'mon" I whispered, with more conviction than I felt, and we slipped through
the forced space into the empty back yard. The tiny yard was only a few feet
square, with a small wash house and lavatory on the right, forming one side, the
large sash window straight ahead looking into the kitchen was another, and the
rickety wooden fence on our left and behind us, completing the enclosure. We
were alone, cut off from all prying eyes, and on somebody else's property with
no one to tell what we could, or couldn't do. I would like to be able to say,
for dramatic effect, that at that moment the light began to fade, as the
afternoon drew to a close, and a chill entered the air as the sun slipped behind
a cloud, causing us to shiver. In truth however, the sky stayed bright, and the
air stayed warm; but inwardly, I began to feel a cold emptiness as I realised I
was entering forbidden territory; my parents would have been horrified if they
knew where I was, and their opinions were the only moral compass I had, not that
it had ever stopped me before, but this time it seemed I might be taking a step
too far.

The yard was empty, except for a small pile of rubble
under the window, which showed little of the gloomy kitchen beyond. The back
door was set in the wash house, at the point where it made a right angle with
the wall the window was set into. David was whispering that we should go home,
we'd done enough, and part of me was in full agreement; but I also felt that the
chance we had might never come again, and I was sure that John, the leader of
our group, and the only one I ever gave ground to, would have been through the
door already if he had been with us. I was determined to see it through, and
with another urgent "C'mon", I tried the door knob. It spun round without
effect, already broken, and the door inched open as I pushed it. Our progress
seemed inexorable, predestined, although not entirely welcome, but an open door
had to be entered, even an ever more reluctant David could see that, and so I
sidled in, with my nervous companion close behind.

Once inside, the comparative brightness of the afternoon
light was obliterated, and we were immersed in a grey half light that forced its
way through the filthy window. The room we were in was small, and completely
stripped of all signs of habitation. All that remained were some bundles of
newspapers, and a few boxes. Everywhere was covered in dust, and smelled musty
and damp. The bareness of it all was a disappointment, as it soon became obvious
that no great adventure or treasure was to be found here. At the far end a
doorway lead to the front room that looked out onto the street, but as the door
was missing we could see pretty clearly that that room was equally bare. On the
left hand side of the door, the closed in stairs led up to the two bedrooms; we
knew this without looking because all the houses had much the same layout, and
this house was very similar to the ones we lived in. There was little to excite
our interest in these gutted rooms, but we were emboldened now we had made the
breakthrough, or break-in to be more exact, into this new lawless environment,
and so , after a brief whispered conference - a whisper was the only appropriate
form of communication in this dead house - we decided to explore upstairs.

We carefully crept forward to the stairs, and together
looked round the corner and up to the dark landing. The stairs were encased in
a blackness that was only slightly alleviated by the faint grey light that
seeped in through the upstairs windows, and it took a few moments before our
eyes adjusted to this new reality, but when they did we were confronted by a
horror that shook our senses, and stopped us breathing, as our flesh crawled and
tightened over our bloodless faces, and cold jolts of nervous energy prickled
behind my ears and down into my contracting stomach. We both moved together,
instinctively, as turning, and bumping into each other , we ran for the safety
of the back door. We stopped there, finally breathing again, but our hearts
still pounding, as we tried to make sense of what we had seen. As we had become
accustomed to the darkness of the stairs we had begun to make out a deeper
blackness in the middle of the stairs, a few feet above our heads. It gradually
resolved itself into the shape of a man, a body, a thing on the stairs. This was
indeed the adventure we had looked for, but now we had found it, we had no idea
of what to do about it. Leaving and going home was the best idea in many ways,
but a waste of an opportunity that might never come again. The quietness of the
house was confidence building; there was no sound nor movement, and whatever was
on the stairs was likely to stay there. "Is it dead?" David whispered, not sure
what the most comforting answer would be, "Must be" I said, also not sure if
that was a comforting thought or not. By this time there was an unspoken
assumption that we would not leave without further investigation, and so we
looked around for a tool to aid in our examination of the cadaver. A short
length of steel pipe in the washroom seemed to serve and so, armed with a
familiar implement, we again approached the stairs.

Again we peered round the corner, and again the
blackness resolved itself into the shape of a man, lying on his side, dressed in
loose, dark clothes with one arm hanging limply, the thin, veined hand stretched
towards us. His face was half hidden, but was pale and lifeless, with one
partially closed eye glistening whitely under the mat of dark hair. I heard Mike
suck in his breath as I reached out with the pipe and carefully poked the leg of
the corpse. I was intrigued , and a bit relieved , to find it firm; I had half
expected that the pipe would sink into a putrescent sticky mass of decay,
probably influenced by the ghost stories my brother delighted to scare me with.
"What's it feel like?" whispered David; "Dunno' " I said, and reached out the
pipe again, this time lifting the dead hand. With that one careless,
disrespectful gesture I brought to a close our afternoon of adventure, and
almost, it seemed, our young lives. As I lifted the hand, the fingers moved and
flexed, and a ghastly catarrhal sound welled up wetly from deep within the
wretched creature before me. More terrifying still, its whole shapeless body
moved, twisted and lurched up into a sitting position, as the white dead face
swivelled towards me, with the pale, wet eyes staring blindly at first, but
then focussing upon me. I was paralysed with fright, I could not move, breath or
think, as my mind was overwhelmed by the impossibility of what was happening,
and my heart crashed painfully in my chest. I was jolted out of my state of
shock by the sound of splintering wood behind me, as David crashed through the
back door and into the yard, leaving me, I immediately realised, alone with the
thing. With this thought, I was galvanised into life, much like the thing
before me, which had begun shuffling down the stairs in my direction, and I
turned and ran. It was only a few yards to the back door, but in my fear I was
clumsy, and I knew the creature was close behind, the long thin arm stretching
toward me, with the bony talon-like fingers an inch from my collar, as it
wheezed and snuffled obscenely in that dingy room. David had left the back door
open and I was through it and into the yard, gasping with fear, and with only
the half open gate to reach. I was through it instantly, leaving a piece of
pullover on the latch, as I wrenched myself through the narrow opening, and into
the passageway, and finally the street.

David was in the middle of the road, hopping from one
leg to the other in a fever of excitement and fear. "What was it?" he yelled,
but I didn't answer; I wanted to get away from that quiet, now cold street as
quickly as I could. David had only seen the hand move, he hadn't waited for the
resurrection, and so couldn't appreciate the full horror of what we had just
experienced. When we had reached our own neighbourhood we talked of the day, and
tried to make sense of what we had seen, but we never told anyone else. They
wouldn't have believed us anyway, I was a renowned fabricator of stories, and
what we had just lived through was too intense, and too visceral to be dismissed
as a fantasy. David and I never visited that neighbourhood alone again, and we
rarely spoke about it. Whether it would have made the same impression on him as
it did on me, I shall never know: he died in a car crash on the Kings Lynn
by-pass some years later, and perhaps he never thought of it again, but for many
years after I would dream of that cold, dead street with the pair of abandoned
houses and their, sightless blank windows.

The Demon Barber

Old Palace Road ran in a long sweep from Dereham Road to
Heigham Street. The Dereham Road end sported minor bomb sites on either side;
neither of great interest, but both well used. The east side site had a large
advertising hoarding, which we utilised as a massive climbing frame; while the
west side doubled up as a wood yard , which gave a lot more variety for our
games on what was otherwise a pretty flat, rubble strewn wasteland. The road was
flanked by terraces for most of its length, until Armes Street?, after which the
western side was dominated by the massive 3 story brick construction that was
the asylum. It had a blank forbidding frontage, studded with small high windows,
ominously barred and meshed. As children we were sure that lunatics lurked
behind those desperate portals, but we never actually saw any; I’m not sure if
it was even occupied at that time, but we were always slightly nervous when we
walked past it, and glad to leave it behind. This area was made still more
interesting though by the terrace of houses on the eastern side. One of the
otherwise featureless houses opposite, all with front door, window and tiny
front garden, housed one of the many endlessly fascinating characters of our
childhood. The clue was in the window of number 192, a grimy placard bearing the
legend “Walter Franklin hairdresser”. "Wally" was a short, strutting little
man, with black brilliantined hair, and always dressed in a shapeless suit. He
ran his business from his tiny front room, and on occasion my mother would take
my brother there for a hair cut – “a very bad haircut”, he recalls, never one to
forget a bad hair cut, even 70 years later. But it wasn’t Wally’s tonsorial
inadequacies that concerned us, it was his short temper and furious rages. He
was obsessed with the war and Hitler, and we quickly learned that it was
possible, from a safe distance, to provoke his passions by sticking out our arm
and yelling “Hitler”, or simply shouting “What did you do in the war Wally”. He
would become incandescent, waving his arms and shouting imprecations at Hitler
and the Germans, in language ripe with the choicest expletives. He would finally
calm down to a furious mutter, which seemed to always accompany him as he strode
aggressively up and down the street. We always assumed that he was mad, which he
may have been, but he was also a notorious drunk, and a legendary gambler who
would lurch home from the pub, his pockets carelessly stuffed with pound notes,
inviting trouble, but not, as far as I know, ever finding it.

Wally very briefly became more than just a sideshow in
my theatre of life, when one day, while sitting in our front room with my mother
and father, we heard footsteps ringing down the passage. “That’ll be my haircut”
Dad said, as the knock came at the back door. At this my skin tingled with
apprehension; they surely couldn’t have invited Wally into the house! I watched
disbelievingly as my mother opened the back door, and there, silhouetted against
the blank wall of the wash house, stood the oily- haired troll, bag in hand.
I’d never been this close to him before, I’d always had somewhere to run to -
suppose he recognised me. I took my normal course of evasive action when
unwelcome visitors arrived, and dived under the table, hidden by the long cloth
that reached nearly to the floor. Mother brought him into the living room, his
legs close enough to touch from my ground level vantage point. “This is Charlie”
my mother said, as Wally looked at my dad lying flat upon the bed. He grunted
something, then speedily sizing up the situation, moved towards the bed, threw
his bag over my father to the wall, and with considerable agility and speed,
clambered up the side of the bed to a kneeling position, and throwing one leg
over, he straddled my father’s chest, and with scissors at the ready , he looked
down into dad’s somewhat startled face. I remember no more, but if my brother’s
testimony is anything to go by, the haircut would not have been of the best,
although to have it safely achieved would probably have been sufficient. To the
best of my knowledge he never came again, and I was never that close to him
again.

Family

I was born 9 months after Brenda, my 10 year old
sister, died, in hospital, of a long standing kidney complaint. I have photos of
her: a genuinely glorious, golden girl whose death left scars in my family that
never healed. I was born in the middle of a great war, to a stricken family, but
never knew the unbearable sadness they must have felt. Whether my arrival in any
way alleviated their suffering I’ll never know, but even towards the end of her
life, my mother would sometimes weep for the daughter she had lost, and whose
comfort she felt would have helped her, in her despair at the onset of age and
illness. My father must have felt pain beyond my understanding, trapped in a
cripple’s bed, unable to even visit his beloved daughter as she lay dying in
hospital; and then on the day of her burial, unable to leave his bed to pay his
last respects, waiting at home with my brother, who was bewildered by the family
activity, but hadn't been told the terrible truth that lay behind it. By the
time I was old enough to have any understanding of those bitter days, the family
had come to terms with their loss – as well as they ever could – and their
stories of Brenda were told with laughter and affection, and remembered love. In
my early, formative years, my sister was still a part of the family, and on many
afternoons, I would attend the grave at Earlham Road cemetery with my mother,
and she would tell me stories of Brenda, and point out the black specks of
birds, wheeling restlessly in the grey sky, and tell me that they were angels,
and Brenda was undoubtedly among them. I’m not sure that in those early years I
really understood the awful finality of that loss, as she was mentioned so
frequently, but in later years I felt something of that ache for a lost
companion whose presence I never enjoyed, but which would have certainly
changed my life, and whose absence I mourn to this day.

TITANS

1

This was bought from the estate of a Norwich legend: a reclusive collector
of the bizarre and unusual, mainly of a sexual or criminal nature. For forty
years he scoured the back alleys of the antique trade, and gleefully probed the
secretive passions of his fellow obsessives, amassing in the process an amazing,
disparate collection of treasures, many of which - such as the item above - only
he knew the origin of. When I first met him 30 years ago he was a man of about
60, a gargantuan 280 pounds, with smooth, pale, and unblemished face,
distinguished by a small goatee beard, and tiny watery eyes. His hands were
smooth and feminine, with delicate fingers and long, uncut nails. He always
dressed, whatever the weather, in a long, checked, once expensive, greatcoat,
and a deerstalker hat. He looked like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Orson
Welles, and carried with him a pungent aroma of ripe putrescence that lingered
long after he had gone. He lived in a tiny four room, end cottage, in a terrace
of three; mouldering in the shadow of the gas works, to whom they belonged.
Built in the 19th century of grey stone, with no amenities, damp and dingy, and
cut high into the side of the hill overlooking the city; Victorian relics, ripe
for demolition, much like Ronnie himself - for I speak of Ronnie Rouse, now
gone, but for decades a name that resonated among the motley crew of dealers,
collectors, charlatans, crooks and obsessives, that made up the fringe of
semi-respectable characters operating in that half world that buys from one
side to sell to the other; not fully trusted by either, but irresistible to
both. A shadowy world that has fascinated me since I was a child, and which I've
now inhabited for too long to ever leave.

I first visited this shrine
to perverse eccentricity on a cold winter afternoon, and was immediately ushered
into a world where the normal functions of everyday life had been transformed by
a mania for collecting and owning, into a tangled undergrowth of objects of
desire; the bizarre, the horrific, and, occasionally, the genuinely exquisite.
All had been mangled into ceiling high edifices of magazines, books and comics;
postcards, photographs and ephemera; piled onto cupboards to create skyscrapers
of desire; a mini Manhattan of the rare, the strange, the beautiful and the
grotesque, through which we shuffled sideways through the narrow corridors left
open, but ever encroaching, as he selectively showed his treasures. A first
issue of Film Fun; Amazing Fantasy #15; a Victorian Penny Dreadful; a drawer
full of clay pipes in exotic shapes, some from the American Civil War; an rare
antique dildo - his much prized "convent cock"; albums full of glorious
Victorian postcards, Valentine and Christmas specials with glowing vibrant
colours, and delicate textures. On the mantelpiece a monstrous stuffed spider
guarded the magnificent ormolu 18th century French clock; while on
every bare surface, however small, there flourished a profusion of china
ornaments, figurines, bric-a-brac; lead soldiers, toys, and strange objects with
no discernible purpose, but which had attracted his restless, magpie eye.

As we sidled through the two
downstairs rooms, it was obvious that only a small part of what he had was
accessible or identifiable; so much was hidden under piles of paper, quietly
rotting against the damp walls, as he relentlessly added more each year to a
collection that was already beyond his control or comprehension. We edged up the
narrow stairs, lined with more books, to the two small rooms that housed yet
more of his madness. On the right, the room full of pornography, his
overwhelming passion. Among the thousands of modern glossy magazines were older
publications, books and drawings from the last hundred years, cataloguing,
describing and illustrating every sexual perversion and variation known to man,
woman or beast; including all three at times in various exotic activities; “The
room of 1000 cunts” as Ronnie delicately put it with his sibilant chuckle. Ahead
was his main room, the room his aged mother occupied for many painful years as
she quietly decayed, under the ministrations of her grotesque man-child. Perhaps
in remembrance of her recent departure, the only human relationship that anybody
knew he ever had, he had acquired a kitten, which he kept in an ornate Victorian
bird cage, to stop it defecating over his treasures, a habit it had quickly
adopted. The treasures included piles of 1940’s Dandy and Beano comics and
annuals, pre-code American and British Horror comics, and his special delight:
pre-war Gems, Magnets, Nelson Lee and Sexton Blake. I examined these in more
detail on later visits - the kitten I never saw again.

On my way out after this
first visit, we stopped in the main downstairs room, and he pulled from a pile
of books, a 1925 Volume of Forensic Medicine by Harvey Littlejohn; a technical
work illustrated with medical photos of victims of crime, both murder and
suicide. As the winter afternoon waned, and the grey light faded beyond the one
grimy window, Ronnie described in his thin high voice, the horrors that lay
within: the throat slit to the spine until it gaped like a monstrous nether
mouth as the lifeless head lolled back; the many minor wounds inflicted by the
suicide on his throat until he summoned the will to make the final desperate
lunge; the head destroyed by the shotgun in the mouth. As he recounted, and
displayed, these brutal, despairing assaults upon the flesh, under a single bare
bulb, his small eyes glinted, his wet lips collected tiny gobbets of spittle as
his excitement mounted, and for the first time in my forays into the murky
depths of obsession, I felt a tingle of apprehension as my skin tightened, and I
felt a need to get back to the fresh air.

I went back many times over
the next years, and even acquired much later, at inflated expense, the volume of
forensic horrors that Ronnie, the quintessential Dickensian Fat Boy, had
gleefully used to “make my flesh creep” on that first, unforgettable visit. I
got to know him well in the following years, although getting close to
competitive, acquisitive and pathologically suspicious Ronnie Rouse was not
easy, and we had a number of personal disputes (everything was personal with
Ronnie!). I shared his sense of the morbid delights of sex and death and horror
in rancid and twisted combinations; his fascination with popular culture; and
his love of the strange; but most importantly we shared that feeling of
community that only the true collector knows, especially when I officially
joined the ranks by opening my shop in 1985, and welcomed Ronnie, much to his
chagrin, as my second customer; the first was much more sweet smelling,
although equally obsessive , and a great competitor of Ronnie’s – but that’s
another story.

2

"Lambert, Omaha, Rackheath" – this cryptic signature,
hidden away in the pages of the old “Exchange and Mart” was the gateway to one
of the most fascinating of the legendary collectors and dealers to emerge from
post-war Norwich, and the one who had the greatest influence on my later career.
Until the 90’s, any mention of Norwich at a collector’s fair, dealing in books,
magazines, comics or paper ephemera of any kind, anywhere in the country would
soon elicit enquiries about Tom Lambert. He was known country wide, and further
afield, among the cognescenti, and most serious collectors had had some dealings
with him. Few, however, had actually met him. He was known exclusively through
the pages of the legendary “Exchange and Mart”; a thick newsprint weekly
publication, that consisted entirely of classified ads, covering every
conceivable commodity, collectable and rarity. It was the bible for collectors,
and devoured eagerly every Thursday, as its devotees trawled through the
thousands of columns for that long sought treasure or bargain. It was the
equivalent of the internet today, and the only way that enthusiasts and dealers
from different parts of the country could buy and sell to each other – it was
eBay writ small, but still a mighty engine of commerce that allowed collectors
to grow their collections, and business’s to thrive, especially the one man
enthusiast turned dealer who had a modicum of business sense.

Tom Lambert was on of these, and one of the greatest.
He was born just before the first world war above a pub in Lower Goat Lane, and
his life before the second World War is very much a mystery. He seems never to
have worked, had no family or friends and simply belonged to that generation of
working class men who struggled through the inter-war depression years leaving
no impression on an implacably grey society. After the War, still alone,
he seems to have moved among the dealers and spivs who thronged Norwich in that
new era when life was hard, old certainties had been destroyed in the preceding
holocaust, and the attitude was to take what was available from the wreckage of
the old life, without too much regard for an uncertain future. The mayhem of
the cattle market in the centre of the city with the noise of the foam flecked
cattle above the shouts of the dealers, as they prodded and beat the bony flanks
with their short thick sticks; the frantic buying, selling, and general dealing
at the packed Corn Hall on Exchange Street, where among the agricultural goods
and implements, would be piles of boxes of general sale items: random boxes of
bric-a-brac; antiques and furniture; books and magazines, a box of Dicken’s
original parts, Tom remembered, spilling onto the ground to be trampled and
kicked in the general melee.

This was the chaotic scene that first introduced Tom
Lambert to the possibilities of trading in these un-regarded cast-offs. He
would have been joined in these excursions by the ever curious Ronnie Rouse,
another loner, alive to the possibilities afforded by these undisciplined
activities. Ronnie however would bring to the exploration a genuine collectors
instinct for the cultural significance of these objects, where Tom only saw the
commercial possibilities. Their shared interest developed into an unlikely
friendship, until Ronnie’s obsessive competitive instinct drove them apart, and
into a bitter rivalry that lasted until a brief, wary reconciliation in my shop
30 years later.

By the mid fifties Tom was living in a tiny flat in
Norwich, surrounded by his ephemera, and beginning his long relationship with
The Exchange and Mart, and through it, the outside world. Within a few years he
had moved to his bungaloo at Rackheath – the legendary “Omaha” – and in another
seven it was all paid for; an achievement he was proud of, all done from the
small kitchen with a notepad and pen, and the Royal Mail. He never saw nor spoke
to his customers, there was no emotional involvement (Ronnie Rouse’s great flaw
Tom always maintained), everything was pure business, and very profitable.

When I first heard about Tom Lambert he was established
and untouchable; a giant among dealers, with a vast knowledge and a remarkable
stock, a hard edged businessman whose word was law and whose business practises
were implacable: he would offer a price if he was buying, and demand a price if
he was selling, and he would not waver by a penny in either case. He had no
sentiment and did no deals, everything was a commodity and everything had a
price. Unlike Ronnie Rouse, who was a familiar figure around Norwich,
and various postcard fairs in other parts of the country, Tom was never seen in
the usual haunts, few people knew what he looked like, and he never spoke of his
business. Every day he would either take the bus, or cycle on his old upright
bike, into the city. He always made for Chaplefield, his refuge, where he had
sat of a bench outside the bandstand or in the shelter for many years. The only
photo I ever saw of Tom as a young man, he was sat on the same benches, in the
same park 30 or more years before. He would mardle with his cronies and discuss
the old days; or get into deep philosophical discussions about the meaning of
life, or the nature of the Universe; and sometimes give a wise and illuminating
tutorial on the nature of collecting and collectors, and ways of doing business.
I know what he spoke about, because his topics were unchanging, although
endlessly fascinating, and I took part in similar conversations and debates over
a number of years, either in his kitchen, or his wonderfully fecund, rambling
garden, an apt metaphor for Tom’s discursive imagination.

I was told about Tom by Ken, a great friend and a
wonderfully inquisitive, alert little man, who picked up scents of collections
or treasures the way a hunting dog follows a trail, undetectable to mere
mortals. Ken was a man who made things happen by following leads, engineering
introductions, and opening doors; his great tragedy was that when he had
achieved his goal, he had no ability to capitalize on it – he was too needy, too
greedy, he always wanted to “do a deal”, which to him was synonymous with taking
advantage, getting something for nothing. He alienated all his contacts and
friends by his total unreliability; he would take, but give nothing back unless
there was something in it for him. I stuck with him for over 20 years, despite
his failings, because I respected his ability to make links, and because we
shared a delight in shady deals and seedy activities. I probably used him the
way he used others, but I gave him friendship and support for many years, until
his final great betrayal of our friendship caused him to reap the whirlwind; I
made sure he got his “comuppance – thrice times filled, and running over” in a
way that broke him; not a thought that now gives me pleasure, and I miss him to
this day, and freely acknowledge the enormous influence he had on introducing me
to the obsessive world of collecting and dealing.

Ken had heard, in his mysterious way, that Tom Lambert
had a vast collection of 16mm films, Ken’s great passion, and that he was
approachable, if it were done with discretion. It was easy to get Tom’s address
from “Exchange and Mart”, but the problem for Ken was that he didn’t have a car,
and so he asked me to take him. I was intrigued by this reclusive figure, and
was glad to lead the expedition to the heart of darkness that was Rackheath.

As we approached the post office at the crossroads in
Rackheath, a ruddy countryman cycled the other way, towards the city. Although
I had no description of Tom, and knew of no one who had ever met him, I knew
instinctively that this was Tom Lambert, a strange insight and one I can’t
explain, although given the importance of Tom to my life over the next 15 years,
I’m sure he would have recognised the synchronicity inherent in the moment, as I
saw my future in that unremarkable cyclist.

We carried on to Rackheath, and soon found the heavy
brick gateposts adorned with the legend “Omaha” that led down an overgrown
driveway to a slightly rundown, but spacious bungalow. Tom wasn’t there , which
didn’t surprise me, but we did make our first contact with the enigmatic Velma,
Tom’s implacable gatekeeper. She was a thin, middle aged woman, with a pinched
face and watchful eyes; she rarely spoke and had no discernable personality, but
she was fiercely loyal to Tom, and followed to the letter his instructions to
admit nobody. We only managed to communicate with her through the letter box,
and then, only to be told “Tom’s not here”, the only words anyone can remember
her speaking . She lived alone in a flat in the city, and took the bus every
day to spend with Tom. I don’t know how they met, or what they had in common,
except perhaps the need that loners have for an unquestioning, undemanding
relationship that is functional but requires no human sympathy. Tom had complete
trust in her, and was glad for her to guard his property, and his privacy. In
return she had some form of human company, and over the years she would
accompany Tom on long walks through Earlham Park, although it’s difficult to
imagine their conversation. Tom once admitted to me in his typically honest,
unsentimental way, that those walks were often totally boring, but despite
their incompatibility, they stayed together for many years. On reflection she
was probably a good, if damaged , woman who gave Tom something missing from his
life. When she died suddenly a few years later, he was shocked, I think, to
find he missed her.

Ken and I worked out after a
few weeks when he was likely to be home, and we finally turned up at his door to
be greeted by the great man himself. Tom was an unlikely bookseller - a big man
with the ruddy, weather-beaten complexion of a farmer; white hair, a white
stubble, and clear blue eyes. He invariably dressed in the summer in baggy
corduroy trousers, with workman boots, a tweed jacket and check lumberjack
shirt; in the winter months this outfit would be augmented by a stained and
shabby gabardine raincoat. He moved slowly and deliberately, and spoke the same
way. He was a cautious man, used to his own company, and wary of strangers. He
stood squarely in the doorframe, with one hand on the handle, as if about to
close it, and was very noncommittal regarding our first enquiries. He was
reluctant to engage with us, and may well have shut the door if Ken had not
launched into one of his masterly spiels. He told him that he had been
recommended to come by one of Tom's cronies, a man called Jack who worked on
Tom's garden on an ad hoc basis, and that he had been told Tom had a collection
of 16mm films that Ken was interested in seeing, with a view to purchase. Tom
was always swayed by the prospect of business, and finally allowed us over the
threshold. On that first visit we didn't get further than the kitchen, but we
did establish a bond that we were able to build upon over the coming months.

Tom's kitchen was not large
and quite sparse: an old cooker and sink; a square deal table in the middle of
the room where Tom carried out all his business; and assorted piles of papers
and magazines ready to be sorted or sent to customers. At that first meeting
Ken did all the talking and he and Tom developed quite a rapport, something that
Ken was very good at developing, especially in the early days of a relationship.
At that time I was very much a bystander; I had no particular interest in 16mm
films, and in all other respects I was an enthusiastic, but very much an
amateur, collector. I had never sold anything in my life, and was very much a
punter: at the mercy of dealers, and to be used for their convenience. As they
talked, Tom became ever more expansive as he relaxed, and Ken fizzed with
energy, enthusiasm and stories: at his best he was great company and
infectiously raised spirits. They finally got round to talking business, and Tom
heaved himself to his feet, and moved to the large floor to ceiling airing
cupboard that took up half of one wall. He opened the double doors to their full
extent and stood back to gauge our reaction. The cupboard was racked out with
wooden shelves, 7 to 8 feet high, 5 feet wide, with every bit of space filled
with hundreds of reels of 16mm film, in cans and boxes; 400 foot and 800 foot
reels; small boxes of odd sized film; and some magnificent antique projectors,
fabulously rare, and of extraordinary design. The whole motley assembly was old
and dusty, with peeling labels, rust and cobwebs, and had obviously been
accumulated by Tom over years of random dealings, and then neglected and half
forgotten, until the right punter came along.

We did no business that first
visit, but had established an important relationship, one that we built over the
next few weeks with more visits, in which we gained more idea of the extent of
Tom's vast collection. The kitchen was only the working space, the other rooms
held the bulk of his stock. The large room at the front of the bungalow was
racked out with stout wooden shelving that held 1000's of magazines: long runs
of Victorian and Edwardian cycling and motor trade magazines; bound volumes,
and piles of loose pre-war film magazines - Picturegoer issues from the 1st
world war to the 50's; Picture Show from the 1st issue in 1919; Film Weekly and
Film Pictorial; and very rare and short lived titles like Illustrated Film
Monthly from 1913 - 1915. Incredibly rare paperback histories of the cinema from
1913 and 1914, hardbacks from 1912; boxes and piles of odd titles and ephemera
from the early days of cinema to the second world war. These were the treasures
that excited my interest, but it would be a long time before I could examine
them properly, or hope to do a deal with Tom to buy them. This room also
contained piles of comics from the 30's and 40's: Dandy, Beano, Sexton Blake,
Gem ,Magnet, Wizard and Hotspur, and piles of annuals from the comic and film
world. Tom also had another room which contained even more extraordinary
wonders, but all these were for later days when I could begin to deal in them
myself ; for the moment I was still just browsing, while Ken and Tom discussed a
deal on the film.

The bulk of the film
contained in that cupboard consisted of scores of wartime news reels from Pathe
News and Gaumont British; many odd films from the 40's such as "Bradman Batting"
and other specialist documentaries; one and two reel movies from 1914 - 17
starring William S. Hart, Tom Mix, and Chaplin, and later two reelers of Laurel
and Hardy from the 1920's. All were fascinating and all were rare, but the heart
of the collection were the newsreels, and this what Ken focussed on. Tom stated
boldly that he wanted £2000 for everything in the cupboard, his business
philosophy was quite clear: When you buy you state the price you are prepared to
pay; when you sell you state the price you want. The figure is always
realistically worked out and inviolable, that way you always have control of the
deal, and never get involved in counter productive, and time wasting haggling. A
lot of customers think that dealers like to haggle, that it's all part of the
game; I can assure anybody reading this that we don't; it's not a game, its a
business, a living. We can only continue to invest time and money in the search
for interesting items if we have a good idea what we're going to get for them,
and therefore know what we can afford to pay. This business is as much an art
as a science of course, and so there is always flexibility built in, but time
wasting disputes about price, and spurious deals, are something that the real
professional will have no patience with. Any punter that walks away from a deal
thinking he has managed to wear down and put one over on the dealer, should be
aware that he will be remembered (dealers never forget a bad deal), and any
future dealings he may wish to have with that particular dealer will involve an
unspoken, but very real, premium, built into the price to take account of the
inevitable haggling that will ensue; sometimes that customer will never see some
choice items, they will be saved for more appreciative clients. If you think
this is a bit extreme, I can assure that over the years I have met many
customers who have a psychological aversion to paying the price asked, and will
sometimes take their obsession to ludicrous lengths.

We visited Tom a number of times over the next few
weeks, during which time I sorted through Tom’s remarkable collection of pre-war
magazines, while Ken talked film. Tom liked Ken, as everybody did, and would
have done good deals with him, but Ken had a magpie mind, and could never see a
bigger picture than the one directly in front of him. He could have used his
contacts to utilise Tom’s stock for his own benefit, but he preferred the small
deal, with no commitment, and so he lost his chance; but left the door open for
me to eventually take full advantage. But not yet – first the opening act had
to be concluded, and this Ken did in his usual way. He bought one reel of film
off Tom for £15, and took another to be paid for on the next visit. This was Ken’s
normal modus operandi, but not Tom’s – he didn’t trust easily, but was
persuaded by Ken’s transparent honesty, a part he could play to perfection. When
we left that day Ken was buoyed by the fact that he had got 2 films for the
price of one, the only kind of deal that really excited him, but I was a bit
concerned that I didn’t have more of a personal relationship with Tom, but was
only tolerated as Ken’s friend, which was now looking a more shaky proposition.
For some time after that I asked Ken if he wanted to go back, but he had lost
interest: he had worked one of his famous deals, and now was ready to move on.
He knew that he would never be able to buy all that Tom had, such deals were
beyond his imaginative range, and so the episode with Tom was finished,
certainly for him, and, it seemed, for me as well.

Customers, Characters and Collectors

In one extreme case, I had a
customer who visited the shop a number of times over a couple of years, and was
always prepared to spend. He had a large farm inthe county, no shortage
of money and was an avid collector of films and projectors. I was the only shop
in the area dealing in these, and so he could always find something of
interest. His problem was that he would never pay the asking price, but had to
have a deal. It took me a few visits to realise the extent of his problem, but
once I had, I was able to price an item high enough initially to give him a
discount; a silly charade and one that I found increasingly irksome. On this
occasion I had a particularly rare projector screen, of an unusually large size,
and almost impossible to find. I knew he had been looking for one for ages, and
when he came in the shop I prepared for battle. I showed it to him with some
reluctance because I knew it could cause a problem, and , sure enough, he
immediately wanted it.

"How
Much?"

I
hesitated, because I guessed whatever I said would be rejected, but I was in no
mood that day to play tiresome games. I could have asked an outrageous price and
then come down, but I gave him a chance to break the habit of a lifetime and be
sensible. I offered it to him for the lowest possible price I could , consistent
with its rarity and desirability:

"£40"

He shook
his head pityingly

"Oh No,
No, No, that's far too much, I couldn't pay that"

"This is
really rare - you know that, £40 is cheap"

"It's
not worth it, I'd rather wait for another one to turn up"

"You'll
wait a long time then, I've never seen one before, and I don't expect to see one
again"

"I'll
have it if you drop the price, but I wouldn't pay £40"

"I'm
afraid it's no deal then , I can't go any lower"

With
that I walked away to talk to another customer, and left him to consider his
position. He wandered around the shop awhile, pretending to look at other
things, but actually trying to find a way out of his self constructed dilemma.
He finally said he had to go, and would I change my mind and lower the price; I
repeated that the price was fair and I couldn't go any lower. He rather
plaintively said " This will be the first time we haven't done a deal, I thought
we could always come to some arrangement". "Maybe another time" I said,
effectively dismissing him. He went to the door, opened it, then hovered in the
doorway, unwilling to leave the screen he so badly wanted, but unable to pay an
asking price, even when he knew it was fair. He looked desperately around the
shop one last time, and his eye alighted on a pile of scratched laser discs
sitting forlornly on a box. "What're they?" he asked "Laser discs, but you need
a special machine to play them". He walked over to them with a lighter step, and
picked up his lifeline. There were only 3 or 4, and completely unsellable, but
he was saved. "Would you include these in the £40?" he asked eagerly. I sighed
inwardly, knowing I was beaten, and agreed. He was immensely cheered, and
obviously relieved, and as he handed over the £40 he picked up his trophies
saying "We always manage a deal in the end don't we? If I ever pick up a machine
these could be really useful",

(or more
likely straight in the nearest bin), I thought, but said nothing, and allowed
him his little victory, which meant so much to him.

NORWICH

I

was born into a world of
fury. In a small corner, of a small island, a small city was being blitzed and
burned by German bombers; not because it was important, but as part of a world
wide insanity that saw our small city as part of a monstrous strategy conceived
by a madman. And in one small part of that 1000 year old city of 100,000
inhabitants, half a mile outside the broken remnants of the centuries old city
wall, that had stood firm against all incursions for 700 years, but now
encircling a cowering city, helpless against the brutal onslaught from the
skies, lay a warren of Victorian terraces, pubs and corner shops; and in one of
those small, four room houses, I first began my journey to, and exploration
of, a world of such profound and wondrous fascination that even now, a
lifetime later, I am still trying to understand its meaning, and grasp its
impalpable essence.

A black sky laced with white
beams of light, restlessly searching; a distant-thunder rumble of engines high
in the darkness; the musty smell of hessian sacking and damp blankets in the
semi-submerged shelter in the back garden, with its two rows of bunks and
kerosene lamp – these may be trace memories, or recollections of stories told
and films seen, mixed with post war explorations of that same shelter that
remained, submerged and weed enveloped, for some years. But however fragmentary
my memories of the blitz might be, the shattered city that I emerged into, at
Wars end, blinking and stumbling as I tried to make sense of this immense new
world, is still as clear and sharp as it was when I first saw it in those
austere, grey, but wonderfully exciting post war years.

The heart of Norwich that
existed within those broken walls was a medieval warren of streets, alleys and
yards; mouldering half timbered buildings leaning over dingy streets, and
poverty stricken tenements; street corner pubs and shops; stone and flint
churches, warehouses and builders yards. But as well as the sprawling evidence
of poverty, amid the detritus of the centuries old neighbourhoods, vibrant
communities existed; and at its heart a bold and proud city centre which told
the story of the centuries in one panorama of disparate , incoherent buildings.
The centrepiece was, and still is, the angular art deco City Hall, built and
dedicated a year before the war began, just in time to defy the bombs that
rained down in those first years. Its bold front steps overlooked a market that
had existed since Norman times, which was itself fringed by a row of splendid
Edwardian shops and banks, and an arcade whose mosaic and decorative
extravagance spoke of the confidence of a time before the first of the great
wars that devastated a nation and a city. From those same steps the market was
flanked on one side of the square by a flint- built, fourteenth century
Guildhall; and on the other side, the great church of St Peter Mancroft, built
in the fourteenth century, and the last resting place of the eminent Sir Thomas
Browne, and many other locally celebrated worthies, whose names and deeds have
faded with their inscriptions on the melting stone. Looking further from the
city hall steps, over the variegated awnings of the market, beyond the Edwardian
pride etched into the imposing buildings of Gentleman’s Walk, piercing the
skyline as it has for 900 years, is the elegant power of the Norman Cathedral,
the equal of any in the country, and to its right, above the foreground
buildings, is the immense man made mound that supports the square, stone faced,
castellated majesty of The Castle, the arrogant edifice that has overlooked the
city from its humble anglo-saxon beginnings, nine hundred years ago. To the
east of the elegant sweep of Castle Meadow that ringed this mound, could be
found the open space that was flanked by the cattle market on one side, the huge
porticoes of the central post office, and the multi-roomed three storied
Victorian edifice that was the great hotel, all of them overlooked by the winged
Victory monument that celebrated the Boer War. This open space led into the
great sweep of the boulevard of Prince of Wales road, flanked on both sides by
impressive Victorian town houses and finishing at the ornate Victorian train
station.

Elysian Fields

T

his was the Norwich that I
began to explore in those post war years, but a Norwich reshaped by the bombs
into something less formal, but infinitely more exciting. Our lives were given
form by many things; school, home and family most obviously, but also by the
wonderful open air playground that Norwich had become: the wreckage left by the
war was our elysian fields; our “playing fields of Eton” were the wondrous bomb
sites that fired our imagination, and fulfilled our fantasies. We Blitz Rats
were occupied all our spare moments by exploring the crumbling walls, rubble
strewn spaces and hidden cellars that now became ours, while the rest of society
passed by, oblivious to our activities, while they painfully, and happily,
slowly, rebuilt their world. I have no memories of any serious injuries suffered
by any of us – not for want of trying as my Mother would probably have said – as
we climbed broken walls to bedrooms reduced to charred joists jutting out
beneath empty windows, recreating the latest pirate adventure 15 feet above the
broken ground; or lowering ourselves carelessly into underground caverns through
fractured floors, and exploring the echoing basement that was the only remnant
of a factory or warehouse otherwise blasted into oblivion.

The best of these was at the
junction of Dereham Road and Barn Road, flanked by remnants of a much earlier
age, the old city wall, which then consisted of a length of flint wall with two
or three Norman style entrances that used to stand beside the long gone St
Benedict's Gate, one of the main entrances into the fortified city. To climb to
the top of this notoriously unstable wall, in full view of passing adults, was
beyond the aspiration of most, but some of us took on the challenge, although
the better option was always the bomb site itself, which was ours, and ours
alone. The great advantage of this particular site was that it was directly
across the road from my local cinema, The Regal, a beautiful little provincial
cinema, built in 1937, and mercifully, from our point of view, spared the bombs.
We could leave the cinema Saturday mornings, our imaginations still aflame with
visions of Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Lash Larue, or the ridiculously
glamorous Buster Crabbe of Flash Gordon fame, and shoot, blast, punch and
generally obliterate ourselves and each other as we galloped, flew, climbed and
dived over mesas and canyons, alien landscapes and hostile environments of all
kinds, that we found perfectly represented in the blasted landscape of a war,
more real to others than our most vivid fantasies, but of which we knew nothing,
and cared less.

Such was the cornucopia of
destruction that was my heritage, that The Regal bomb site, although only a
short walk from my house, was by no means the first encountered on my journey.
The first was in retrospect the most horrifying, because of the possibilities of
disaster it represented.

My house was in a maze of
Victorian terraces; a few houses one way was a tiny crossroad, on each corner a
staple of life; two pubs, a general store and a butchers, the baker was round
the corner beside the general store. That way lay school and grandparents,
important in their own way, especially to the adults, but uninspiring to young
imaginations. A few houses the other way however, and I would reach the great
thoroughfare that was Dereham Road: turn left and the way was clear to the
wondrous metropolis that always beckoned me. Before I reached that gateway to
discovery however, I only had to go three houses along before I came to a gap in
the terrace, a charred and broken gap, a missing tooth in a madman’s grimace, a
reminder of the horror just passed. An incendiary had fallen directly onto the
house and it had burned to the stone floor, quite capable of taking the whole
row with it, but mercifully contained. This was the great fear of my father,
trapped in an invalid’s bed a few yards away, and at the mercy of any fire that
took control. We could go to the shelter, but the difficulty of carrying him
there , and then getting him in , posed so many difficulties that he chose to
stay in the house, often kept company by my brother, who sheltered under the
table, as they watched the glow through the one dirty window, and probably
prayed. He was a brave man who bore his terrible affliction with grace and good
humour, but he was afraid of the fire, my Mother told me this years later, and
suffered fears and torments that few people experience. Such was the war, and
the legacy of the war, as I will discuss later, that we blitz rats never knew
about, and so never let temper our delight in our world of fantasy.

This sombre relic was again
utilised by us for recreation, although its proximity to home meant that we
never felt free to do much more than the always pleasant pastime of leaping from
a broken wall onto the unsuspecting back of the more easily bullied member of
the gang, and sending him headfirst into a pile of rubble. Big Tony was the
usual recipient of this treatment, as he was a big target to hit, was somewhat
slow witted and uncomplaining, and sported a purple birthmark that covered half
his face, a sure sign of victimhood to our unforgiving eyes. He suffered further
humiliation at my hands, when, playing behind a low wall at the barbers on the
corner of West End and Nelson street, I threw a stick into the street at an
approaching cyclist, with the unexpected, but definitely gratifying result of
seeing it lodge in his front spokes and throw him over the handlebars. The
enormity of what I’d done soon calmed my excitement, and we quickly scurried
away, leaving my victim groaning semi-conscious in the street. On the short walk
home I calmed my fears of retribution by persuading a bemused, but frightened,
Big Tony, that he had been solely responsible, and would undoubtedly go to
prison. “What will my Mum say” he wailed as I left him at the alley leading to
his back door; I shrugged, to indicate that you reap what you sow, and went home
whistling.

The only other memory I have
of Tony was when we were sauntering up Dereham Road and approached the second of
the bombsites that led to the city. This was partially utilised as a wood yard
at the time, and therefore afforded even more opportunities to cheat death as we
clambered over dangerously swaying piles of sawn planks. On this day however we
had no thought of the wood yard, but were stopped at the entrance by a mousey
middle aged man in a grubby raincoat. He asked us quietly if we would like to
see something interesting, which seemed to two bored boys a reasonable offer on
a quiet day. We looked at each other and said “OK”., then followed him into the
stacks of wood, where he stopped, turned round and opened his raincoat. We
regarded his unremarkable member with some bemusement as we realised that this
was the “something interesting” we had been promised; it was of no interest to
us and so we exchanged glances, then turned and walked back to the road. Once
clear of the yard, Tony was immediately indignant “when he said something
interesting I thought he meant chickens, or maybe rabbits, not that”. I sagely
concurred that chickens, or even rabbits, would have been far more interesting.
And so we ambled away, again aware that adults were a strange species, but un
perturbed, and un perverted, never to mention it or think of it again.

Adelaide Street

16

Adelaide street was a four
room terrace house, with a narrow enclosed passage running from the street to
the back yard, narrow enough for me to be able to straddle the opening and walk
up the wall by the time I was seven or eight. The back yard was shared by our
neighbours, the Browns. Mr Brown was a grime encrusted coalman, a fearsome
taciturn character to my eyes, and to whom I never spoke. Their only son
Georgie, although a couple of years older, was a best friend, but only in the
back yard, he never shared our adventures in the outside world, nor joined us at
the pictures. We spent most of our time in the back yard, and rarely visited
each others houses; one of the few times I remember being in his house, we sat
in a corner of the small living room, playing shops with our strips of
plastecine, while his parents say round the wireless listening with rapt
attention to a new programme called "The Archers". It was not a programme we
listened to in our house, and only increased my feelings that the Browns were
somewhat different, and somehow connected to the countryside, a world beyond my
ken; my tastes were more attuned to "The Man In Black", classic ghost stories
narrated with sepulchral relish by Valentine Dyall, whose doom laden rendering
of Bram Stoker's "The Judges House" haunted my imagination for years. Yet
another unforgettable moment, in a childhood of such moments, that helped
create the obsessive collector I am today.

George was a serious boy,
well read in adventure "yarns" as he called them, and possessing scientific
facts gleaned from his magazines that brooked no contradiction. He probably
regarded himself as my mentor, but I teased him without mercy, deliberately
breaking the formal rules he set up for our games, to his eternal chagrin. One
particular game involved the ever present water pistols, which on this occasion
were used in an assault on the outside lavatory, a pair of which stood a few
yards from our back doors. I was defending my lavatory from the inside, while he
attacked it by attempting to fire over the gap at the top of the door. Although
trapped I had the advantage of a ready supply of water to refill my gun. Georgie
insisted that, as an absolute rule, I had to fill my gun from the cistern, and
not the lavatory pan. I quickly agreed, and just as quickly ignored him;
Georgie's rules were there to be broken after all, that was the point of them to
me. He would probably never have realised my treachery, had I not popped above
the door while he was approaching and caught him full in his open mouth with a
splendid shot. I dropped down again and listened to him spluttering and
coughing: "Are you sure you're getting that from the cistern?" he demanded, "it
tastes funny". I was laughing too much to answer, and, unsurprisingly Georgie
lost interest in the game, and went indoors.

Beyond these was a narrow
overgrown garden that led to a wall that was the boundary of The Model School,
a Catholic preparatory school for girls, that had an imposing wrought iron
entrance gate on Dereham road, but whose playground at the back shared a wall
with our back garden. I spent many happy moments precariously clinging to the
top of the wall as I watched the girls shrieking and giggling as they took their
break, or, most delightfully, when they had their netball lessons in their dark
blue bloomers. I was painfully shy, and so dropped back immediately if they
spotted me. The only other reason for going into the garden was to visit the
large overgrown gooseberry bush, with its lethal thorns, but gorgeous, ripe
plump fruit. We didn't have much in the way of fresh fruit in those days, and
the gooseberries, although not to everyone's taste, were a joy to me. The large
green berries, with their veins and tiny hairs, were only for the bravest; as
you bitinto them the tough outer skin gave way with a satisfying crunch,
and our mouths were flooded with the sharp acidic juice, that brought tears to
our eyes, as we struggled to maintain a straight face, before collapsing into
satisfied giggles. The real treat was finding the later, ripe berries, purple
and soft, with an incomparable sweetness, that I remember to this day, although,
strangely, I can't remember eating one since. Georgie's adjacent garden was a
more formal affair, with two rows of wooden sheds that housed rabbits and
chickens. Geogie took great pleasure in letting me watch when his father
decapitated a chicken, then let it flutter and stagger headless for a few
horrifying moments. With a working father, the Browns lived well with their
chicken dinners - but they didn't have a gooseberry bush.

I have fond memories of
George, and that tiny back yard. It was a large part of the only world I knew
for a number of years, along with the streets and bomb sites. A few feet from
our back door was the wash house, dark and chilly, with a large stone sink, and
not a place I had much time for. Beside that were the pair of outside
lavatories, useful for much more than the usual purposes, as related above. My
brother Michael, seven years older, and far more knowledgeable and sophisticated
than I, would hang on to the door, and swing backwards and forwards yelling "The
Bells!, The Bells! - they made me deaf". I was overwhelmed with laughter and
admiration, even though it was some years before I saw Charles Laughton perform
the same trick as "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", and more years later that I
climbed the tedious steps to the real bell tower at Notre Dame in Paris and
contemplated the great bell "Jacqueline". As I stood with a few other visitors,
silently contemplating the massive bronze artifact, I had before me an
imperishable image of a creaking wooden lavatory door swinging to and fro with a
twelve year old boy attached, shouting his incantation to the skies. Thus
reality, memory, fantasy and imagination combine and merge to create a new
surreal reality that adds colour and texture to the everyday ; thus we
collectors and enthusiasts collect more than objects, we collect memories and
dreams which we weave unconsciously into the commonplace, to add texture to the
ordinary, and give potential for everyday to be a new discovery.

The Thing on the Stairs

D

avid was one of the ragged
urchins that infested the Adelaide Street neighbourhood, part of our loose knit
gang, but no especial friend of mine. On this particular day however we somehow
found ourselves alone on the streets, as we wandered with our ever present
sticks, idly slicing the heads off any front garden flowers we could reach, as
we wandered past rows of unremarkable terraced houses, looking for something to
relieve the boredom. We found ourselves finally out of our familiar
neighbourhood, across Old Palace Road, and into a maze of Streets, less than
half a mile from our own, and nearly identical, but far enough away for us to be
anonymous, and therefore with more licence to attempt exploits that we had to be
wary of in our own streets, where we could be informed upon to parents, ever
looking for an excuse, it seemed to us, to fly into a rage, and impose irksome
restrictions upon our freedom.

We noted with increasing
interest that a number of these terraced houses were apparently empty, abandoned
even. The few yards from the gate to the front door were sprouting weeds, with
sometimes a large cobweb attached to the door itself. This wasn't necessarily
conclusive proof of no occupant , as front doors were not always used in those
days; I personally never saw our front door opened in all the years I lived in
Adelaide Street, it was common practise to use the back door at all times. The
back doors in the terraces were always accessed by way of a narrow passage every
half dozen or so houses, which would lead to the backs of three houses either
side, all enclosed in their own back yards. On this occasion we were looking for
evidence of neglect, no curtains, and no light or movement inside; and in that
long, empty street, on a grey autumnal afternoon we found the perfect site: a
pair of houses with weed encrusted fronts, peeling paint on doors and windows,
an abandoned cooker barring the way to one front door, and a grimy sack covering
half of one window. Through the dirt-encrusted windows there was no sign of
life, as they stood lifeless and abandoned, relics of war time displacement
probably, and merely waiting for the inevitable bulldozer when the clearances
finally began some years later. What made these two dilapidated properties
ideal, was that they stood on either side of a passage, and so gave us perfect
privacy as we entered it. David was reluctant at first, but my enthusiasm
persuaded him that an adventure beckoned with no consequences; I was normally
fairly cautious, but that day I could see no downside to what had to be an
activity that would produce a great story when we met up with the others later.
And so we slipped into the gloomy passageway.

All the passages echoed, and
this was no exception, our steps rang in the narrow enclosure, but there was no
other sound, no voices, no movement, the houses were ours, and ours alone . At
the end , as we came back into the light, a wooden fence enclosed the tiny back
yard on our right, while on the other side the yard was open, and filled with
foot high weeds, and a wheel less pram abandoned on the back step, further proof
that nothing lived here. The fenced-in back yard was the obvious one to explore,
as it gave complete privacy, and meant that the ever anticipated shout of
outrage from a dangerous adult could be forgotten. The wooden fence was about 5
feet high, and falling apart, but the gate was intact, although leaning
dangerously on its hinges. We looked at each other - David wasn't sure, but my
excitement had infected him, and so we carefully pushed on the gate. It stuck at
first, as it was resting on the ground, but a more determined shove forced it
forward two feet, with a hideous grating sound that caused the first, but not
the last, shock to my nervous system that day. We stared wide eyed at each other
for some seconds, and at that point could easily have run back to the street.
There was no reaction from the eerily silent world around us however, and as we
calmed down, the partially, but sufficiently, opened gate seemed to invite us
in. "C'mon" I whispered, with more conviction than I felt, and we slipped
through the forced space into the empty back yard. The tiny yard was only a few
feet square, with a small wash house and lavatory on the right, forming one
side, the large sash window straight ahead looking into the kitchen was another,
and the rickety wooden fence on our left and behind us, completing the
enclosure. We were alone, cut off from all prying eyes, and on somebody else's
property with no one to tell what we could, or couldn't do. I would like to be
able to say, for dramatic effect, that at that moment the light began to fade,
as the afternoon drew to a close, and a chill entered the air as the sun slipped
behind a cloud, causing us to shiver. In truth however, the sky stayed bright,
and the air stayed warm; but inwardly, I began to feel a cold emptiness as I
realised I was entering forbidden territory; my parents would have been
horrified if they knew where I was, and their opinions were the only moral
compass I had, not that it had ever stopped me before, but this time it seemed I
might be taking a step too far.

The yard was empty, except
for a small pile of rubble under the window, which showed little of the gloomy
kitchen beyond. The back door was set in the wash house, at the point where it
made a right angle with the wall the window was set into. David was whispering
that we should go home, we'd done enough, and part of me was in full agreement;
but I also felt that the chance we had might never come again, and I was sure
that John, the leader of our group, and the only one I ever gave ground to,
would have been through the door already if he had been with us. I was
determined to see it through, and with another urgent "C'mon", I tried the door
knob. It spun round without effect, already broken, and the door inched open as
I pushed it. Our progress seemed inexorable, predestined, although not entirely
welcome, but an open door had to be entered, even an ever more reluctant David
could see that, and so I sidled in, with my nervous companion close behind.

Once inside, the comparative
brightness of the afternoon light was obliterated, and we were immersed in a
grey half light that forced its way through the filthy window. The room we were
in was small, and completely stripped of all signs of habitation. All that
remained were some bundles of newspapers, and a few boxes. Everywhere was
covered in dust, and smelled musty and damp. The bareness of it all was a
disappointment, as it soon became obvious that no great adventure or treasure
was to be found here. At the far end a doorway lead to the front room that
looked out onto the street, but as the door was missing we could see pretty
clearly that that room was equally bare. On the left hand side of the door, the
closed in stairs led up to the two bedrooms; we knew this without looking
because all the houses had much the same layout, and this house was very similar
to the ones we lived in. There was little to excite our interest in these gutted
rooms, but we were emboldened now we had made the breakthrough, or break-in to
be more exact, into this new lawless environment, and so , after a brief
whispered conference - a whisper was the only appropriate form of communication
in this dead house - we decided to explore upstairs.

We carefully crept forward to
the stairs, and together looked round the corner and up to the dark landing.
The stairs were encased in a blackness that was only slightly alleviated by the
faint grey light that seeped in through the upstairs windows, and it took a few
moments before our eyes adjusted to this new reality, but when they did we were
confronted by a horror that shook our senses, and stopped us breathing, as our
flesh crawled and tightened over our bloodless faces, and cold jolts of nervous
energy prickled behind my ears and down into my contracting stomach. We both
moved together, instinctively, as turning, and bumping into each other , we ran
for the safety of the back door. We stopped there, finally breathing again, but
our hearts still pounding, as we tried to make sense of what we had seen. As we
had become accustomed to the darkness of the stairs we had begun to make out a
deeper blackness in the middle of the stairs, a few feet above our heads. It
gradually resolved itself into the shape of a man, a body, a thing on the
stairs. This was indeed the adventure we had looked for, but now we had found
it, we had no idea of what to do about it. Leaving and going home was the best
idea in many ways, but a waste of an opportunity that might never come again.
The quietness of the house was confidence building; there was no sound nor
movement, and whatever was on the stairs was likely to stay there. "Is it dead?"
David whispered, not sure what the most comforting answer would be, "Must be" I
said, also not sure if that was a comforting thought or not. By this time there
was an unspoken assumption that we would not leave without further
investigation, and so we looked around for a tool to aid in our examination of
the cadaver. A short length of steel pipe in the washroom seemed to serve and
so, armed with a familiar implement, we again approached the stairs.

Again we peered round the
corner, and again the blackness resolved itself into the shape of a man, lying
on his side, dressed in loose, dark clothes with one arm hanging limply, the
thin, veined hand stretched towards us. His face was half hidden, but was pale
and lifeless, with one partially closed eye glistening whitely under the mat of
dark hair. I heard Mike suck in his breath as I reached out with the pipe and
carefully poked the leg of the corpse. I was intrigued , and a bit relieved , to
find it firm; I had half expected that the pipe would sink into a putrescent
sticky mass of decay, probably influenced by the ghost stories my brother
delighted to scare me with. "What's it feel like?" whispered David; "Dunno' "
I said, and reached out the pipe again, this time lifting the dead hand. With
that one careless, disrespectful gesture I brought to a close our afternoon of
adventure, and almost, it seemed, our young lives. As I lifted the hand, the
fingers moved and flexed, and a ghastly catarrhal sound welled up wetly from
deep within the wretched creature before me. More terrifying still, its whole
shapeless body moved, twisted and lurched up into a sitting position, as the
white dead face swivelled towards me, with the pale, wet eyes staring blindly
at first, but then focussing upon me. I was paralysed with fright, I could not
move, breath or think, as my mind was overwhelmed by the impossibility of what
was happening, and my heart crashed painfully in my chest. I was jolted out of
my state of shock by the sound of splintering wood behind me, as David crashed
through the back door and into the yard, leaving me, I immediately realised,
alone with the thing. With this thought, I was galvanised into life, much
like the thing before me, which had begun shuffling down the stairs in my
direction, and I turned and ran. It was only a few yards to the back door, but
in my fear I was clumsy, and I knew the creature was close behind, the long thin
arm stretching toward me, with the bony talon-like fingers an inch from my
collar, as it wheezed and snuffled obscenely in that dingy room. David had left
the back door open and I was through it and into the yard, gasping with fear,
and with only the half open gate to reach. I was through it instantly, leaving a
piece of pullover on the latch, as I wrenched myself through the narrow opening,
and into the passageway, and finally the street.

David was in the middle of
the road, hopping from one leg to the other in a fever of excitement and fear.
"What was it?" he yelled, but I didn't answer; I wanted to get away from that
quiet, now cold, street as quickly as I could. David had only seen the hand
move, he hadn't waited for the resurrection, and so couldn't appreciate the full
horror of what we had just experienced. When we had reached our own
neighbourhood we talked of the day, and tried to make sense of what we had seen,
but we never told anyone else. They wouldn't have believed us anyway, I was a
renowned fabricator of stories, and what we had just lived through was too
intense, and too visceral to tolerate being dismissed as a fantasy. David and I
never visited that neighbourhood alone again, and we rarely spoke about it.
Whether it would have made the same impression on him as it did on me, I shall
never know: he died in a car crash on the Kings Lynn by-pass some years later,
and perhaps he never thought of it again, but for many years after I would
dream of that cold, dead street with the pair of abandoned houses and their,
sightless blank windows.

The Demon Barber

O

ld Palace Road ran in a long
sweep from Dereham Road to Heigham Street. The Dereham Road end sported minor
bomb sites on either side; neither of great interest, but both well used. The
east side site had a large advertising hoarding, which we utilised as a massive
climbing frame; while the west side doubled up as a wood yard, as mentioned
earlier, which gave a lot more variety for our games on what was otherwise a
pretty flat, rubble strewn wasteland. The road was flanked by terraces for most
of its length, until Armes Street, after which the western side was dominated by
the massive 3 story brick construction that was the asylum. It had a blank
forbidding frontage, studded with small high windows, ominously barred and
meshed. As children we were sure that lunatics lurked behind those desperate
portals, but we never actually saw any; I’m not sure if it was even occupied at
that time, but we were always slightly nervous when we walked past it, and glad
to leave it behind. This area was made still more interesting though by the
terrace of houses on the eastern side. One of the otherwise featureless houses
opposite, all with front door, window and tiny front garden, housed one of the
many endlessly fascinating characters of our childhood. The clue was in the
window of number 192, a grimy placard bearing the legend “Walter Franklin
hairdresser”. "Wally" was a short, strutting little man, with black
brilliantined hair, and always dressed in a shapeless suit. He ran his business
from his tiny front room, and on occasion my mother would take my brother there
for a hair cut – “a very bad haircut”, he recalls, never one to forget a bad
hair cut, even 70 years later. But it wasn’t Wally’s tonsorial inadequacies that
concerned us, it was his short temper and furious rages. He was obsessed with
the war and Hitler, and we quickly learned that it was possible, from a safe
distance, to provoke his passions by sticking out our arm and yelling “Hitler”,
or simply shouting “What did you do in the war Wally”. He would become
incandescent, waving his arms and shouting imprecations at Hitler and the
Germans, in language ripe with the choicest expletives. He would finally calm
down to a furious mutter, which seemed to always accompany him as he strode
aggressively up and down the street. We always assumed that he was mad, which he
may have been, but he was also a notorious drunk, and a legendary gambler who
would lurch home from the pub, his pockets carelessly stuffed with pound notes,
inviting trouble, but not, as far as I know, ever finding it.

Wally very briefly became
more than just a sideshow in my theatre of life, when one day, while sitting in
our front room with my mother and father, we heard footsteps ringing down the
passage. “That’ll be my haircut” Dad said, as the knock came at the back door.
At this my skin tingled with apprehension; they surely couldn’t have invited
Wally into the house! I watched disbelievingly as my mother opened the back
door, and there, silhouetted against the blank wall of the wash house, stood the
oily - haired troll, bag in hand. I’d never been this close to him before, I’d
always had somewhere to run to - suppose he recognised me. I took my normal
course of evasive action when unwelcome visitors arrived, and dived under the
table, hidden by the long cloth that reached nearly to the floor. Mother brought
him into the living room, his legs close enough to touch from my ground level
vantage point. “This is Charlie” my mother said, as Wally looked at my dad lying
flat upon the bed. He grunted something, then speedily sizing up the situation,
moved towards the bed, threw his bag over my father to the wall, and with
considerable agility and speed, clambered up the side of the bed to a kneeling
position, and throwing one leg over, he straddled my father’s chest, and with
scissors at the ready , he looked down into dad’s somewhat startled face. I
remember no more, but if my brother’s testimony is anything to go by, the
haircut would not have been of the best, although to have it safely achieved
would probably have been sufficient. To the best of my knowledge he never came
again, and I was never that close to him again.

FRIENDS

O

f all our loose gang of
friends, John was the most interesting to me. We were both intelligent and
independent, and more likely to be leaders than lead, John however was far more
self confident than I was at that time, and so exuded a charisma that my more
reserved demeanour could never match. It made him the de facto leader of
our gang, inasmuch as our rather disparate group had such an exalted member. We
spent a lot of time together, because we could talk and joke together in a way
that the others could never join in with. The others were friends to be used
for our own amusement, whereas John and I were nearly equal, although I was
required, for our friendship to survive, to dance to his tune; the only time in
my life I've ever given ground in that way. John lived with his mother and
younger brother just round the corner from us in West End Street. His mother was
an attractive young woman, whose husband had spent 5 years in the services, and
who kept herself somewhat aloof from the rest of the neighbourhood. John was
tall, fair-haired and blue eyed, while his younger brother Alan, was short,
stocky, and olive skinned, with black hair. A few eyebrows were raised in the
neighbourhood, a few comments were whispered behind closed doors, but the war
had delivered many different forms of casualties, and there was a general
tolerance shown towards the various walking wounded.

I was generally a loner, with
nothing much in common with my neighbourhood gang, although John was the
exception because he could always surprise me. We were walking along St
Benedict's towards the Theatre De Luxe one afternoon, and passed a fruit stall.
A few yards on I said to John "Those plums looked nice"; he casually reached
into his capacious coat pocket, pulled one out and held it out towards me: "Have
one then" he said insouciantly, as he pulled out another for himself. It was a
perfect line, and I'm sure he enjoyed it, as my face registered the requisite
wonderment at his piece of legerdemain. His tricks were not normally something I
would have the daring to do myself, but there was one I did attempt to
replicate, with mixed results. We were walking past the post office building
that adjoined the ever inviting Theatre De Luxe, when we saw a pretty young
woman approaching. "Watch this" John said as she hurried towards us. When she
was nearly level with us, John said loudly "Yesterday my Dad caught a fish as
big as this", and at the same moment flung his arms wide to describe the size.
His timing was impeccable, and his outstretched hand caught her breast
perfectly. We walked on, then turned round chuckling: to this day I can see the
young woman standing turned towards us, clutching her breast, as she directed a
look of furious hatred towards the two scruffy, grinning boys who had treated
her with such lack of respect.

This incident stayed with me,
until I had a chance to practise the same trick myself. My first school was
Nelson Street, a little local primary school that had been attended by my
father, and brother, and in later years my own children. It had been brutalised
by the blitz, and in my day had temporary pre-fab buildings to house many of the
classrooms, but also a good sized playground set among some aged oaks. I didn't
have a particularly happy time there, mainly due to my inherent shyness, that
was exacerbated by being thrown into close proximity to lots of other children I
didn't know, and couldn't really relate to. I was probably considered odd, and
treated accordingly, which led to some bizarre behaviour on my part, especially
directed toward those who made me feel inferior. A girl that I particularly
admired, a superior pretty girl, would never even acknowledge that I existed,
and to this day I'm not sure I ever spoke to her. My only inter reaction with
her came one day when, again ignoring my obvious devotion, she had propped up
her heavy oak desk lid while she looked inside; I sauntered past, unable to
speak, but determined to let her know I existed, I casually nudged the desk lid
and sent it crashing down on her unprotected head. She was taken to the nurse
and then home, while I endured glares from my teacher, and accusations of
stupidity, which I was used to. I was happy to face no graver charges, and
resigned myself to the fact that Carol - the superior girl - and I, would never
be soul mates.

I was not friends with any in
my class that I can remember, and actively disliked a number of them. I was
poor, and knew it, poorer than most in fact, and so unable to relate to those
members of my school who had things I could never aspire to, like bikes and
various spectacular toys. They were probably not far above my working class
status, but they had a life that I couldn't hope to have, and even in those very
early years, distinctions of class and family were very apparent, and ate away
at my self-confidence, while it fed my resentment. One particular classmate
with whom I had never had anything much to do, was one day cheerfully talking
about his new bike to a group of friends, to my great annoyance. Although I
would never have normally considered giving form to my resentment, on this
occasion an opportunity presented itself that I couldn't pass up.

In the playground during our
break, I was walking through the trees with somebody, while behind me I could
hear the boy with the bike talking loudly as he ran excitedly towards our
backs. I glanced round to judge the range, and then resolved to put John's trick
to the test. As my victim approached at full speed I waited for him to draw
nearly level, then loudly said, out of the blue, to my startled companion "
Yesterday my Dad caught a fish this big" and flung my arms wide in
demonstration. I can't believe I expected it to work, but John's trick was
obviously foolproof, and my out flung fist caught my onrushing , and unprepared,
classmate full in the eye with terrific force. He screamed, and fell to the
floor clutching his face, where he lay, surrounded by anxious classmates and
teachers, while I moved away through the trees, mumbling to anyone in earshot,
that he had run into me, and I had no idea what had happened. My tingling fist
was evidence that I had succeeded far beyond my expectations, and the possible
consequences now crowded in on me. I contemplated going home, or maybe just
hiding somewhere, but it seemed that any such actions would only lead to more
questions I couldn't answer. I finally waited until break had finished, then
filed back into the classroom with the rest of the class, expecting at any
moment to be called to account, and dragged out of class to face the
headmaster. My victims desk was empty, and remained so for some days, and every
hour of those days I suffered agonies of guilt and fear, although never remorse:
I was glad to no longer hear about his bike, but convinced that retribution
would come. But although there were whispers from teachers, directed I felt, at
me, and certainly baleful glares that were intended for me, I was never accused
of anything more than stupidity , which I could handle; and when the victim came
back the next week with no more than a multi coloured bruise fading from around
his eye, I finally relaxed and accepted that life would go on.

Family

I

was born 9 months after
Brenda, my 10 year old sister, died, in hospital, of a long standing kidney
complaint. I have photos of her: a genuinely glorious, golden girl whose death
left scars in my family that never healed. I was born in the middle of a great
war, to a stricken family, but never knew the unbearable sadness they must have
felt. Whether my arrival in any way alleviated their suffering I’ll never know,
but even towards the end of her life, my mother would sometimes weep for the
daughter she had lost, and whose comfort she felt would have helped her, in her
despair at the onset of age and illness. My father must have felt pain beyond
my understanding, trapped in a cripple’s bed, unable to even visit his beloved
daughter as she lay dying in hospital; and then on the day of her burial, unable
to leave his bed to pay his last respects, waiting at home with my brother, who
was bewildered by the family activity, but hadn't been told the terrible truth
that lay behind it. By the time I was old enough to have any understanding of
those bitter days, the family had come to terms with their loss – as well as
they ever could – and their stories of Brenda were told with laughter and
affection, and remembered love. In my early, formative years, my sister was
still a part of the family, and on many afternoons, I would attend the grave at
Earlham Road cemetery with my mother, and she would tell me stories of Brenda,
and point out the black specks of birds, wheeling restlessly in the grey sky,
and tell me that they were angels, and Brenda was undoubtedly among them. I’m
not sure that in those early years I really understood the awful finality of
that loss, as she was mentioned so frequently, but in later years I felt
something of that ache for a lost companion whose presence I never enjoyed, but
which would have certainly changed my life, and whose absence I mourn to this
day.

TITANS

1

T

his was
bought from the estate of a Norwich legend: a reclusive collector of the
bizarre and unusual, mainly of a sexual or criminal nature. For forty years he
scoured the back alleys of the antique trade, and gleefully probed the secretive
passions of his fellow obsessives, amassing in the process an amazing, disparate
collection of treasures, many of which - such as the item above - only he knew
the origin of. When I first met him 30 years ago he was a man of about 60, a
gargantuan 280 pounds, with smooth, pale, and unblemished face, distinguished by
a small goatee beard, and tiny watery eyes. His hands were smooth and feminine,
with delicate fingers and long, uncut nails. He always dressed, whatever the
weather, in a long, checked, once expensive, greatcoat, and a deerstalker hat.
He looked like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Orson Welles, and carried
with him a pungent aroma of ripe putrescence that lingered long after he had
gone. He lived in a tiny four room, end cottage, in a terrace of three;
mouldering in the shadow of the gas works, to whom they belonged. Built in the
19th century of grey stone, with no amenities, damp and dingy, and cut high into
the side of the hill overlooking the city; Victorian relics, ripe for
demolition, much like Ronnie himself - for I speak of Ronnie Rouse, now gone,
but for decades a name that resonated among the motley crew of dealers,
collectors, charlatans, crooks and obsessives, that made up the fringe of
semi-respectable characters operating in that half world that buys from one
side to sell to the other; not fully trusted by either, but irresistible to
both. A shadowy world that has fascinated me since I was a child, and which I've
now inhabited for too long to ever leave.

I first
visited this shrine to perverse eccentricity on a cold winter afternoon, and was
immediately ushered into a world where the normal functions of everyday life had
been transformed by a mania for collecting and owning, into a tangled
undergrowth of objects of desire; the bizarre, the horrific, and, occasionally,
the genuinely exquisite. All had been mangled into ceiling high edifices of
magazines, books and comics; postcards, photographs and ephemera; piled onto
cupboards to create skyscrapers of desire; a mini Manhattan of the rare, the
strange, the beautiful and the grotesque, through which we shuffled sideways
through the narrow corridors left open, but ever encroaching, as he selectively
showed his treasures. A first issue of Film Fun; Amazing Fantasy #15; a
Victorian Penny Dreadful; a drawer full of clay pipes in exotic shapes, some
from the American Civil War; an rare antique dildo - his much prized "convent
cock"; albums full of glorious Victorian postcards, Valentine and Christmas
specials with glowing vibrant colours, and delicate textures. On the mantelpiece
a monstrous stuffed spider guarded the magnificent ormolu 18th
century French clock; while on every bare surface, however small, there
flourished a profusion of china ornaments, figurines, bric-a-brac; lead
soldiers, toys, and strange objects with no discernible purpose, but which had
attracted his restless, magpie eye.

As we
sidled through the two downstairs rooms, it was obvious that only a small part
of what he had was accessible or identifiable; so much was hidden under piles of
paper, quietly rotting against the damp walls, as he relentlessly added more
each year to a collection that was already beyond his control or comprehension.
We edged up the narrow stairs, lined with more books, to the two small rooms
that housed yet more of his madness. On the right, the room full of pornography,
his overwhelming passion. Among the thousands of modern glossy magazines were
older publications, books and drawings from the last hundred years, cataloguing,
describing and illustrating every sexual perversion and variation known to man,
woman or beast; including all three at times in various exotic activities; “The
room of 1000 cunts” as Ronnie delicately put it with his sibilant chuckle. Ahead
was his main room, the room his aged mother occupied for many painful years as
she quietly decayed, under the ministrations of her grotesque man-child. Perhaps
in remembrance of her recent departure, the only human relationship that anybody
knew he ever had, he had acquired a kitten, which he kept in an ornate Victorian
bird cage, to stop it defecating over his treasures, a habit it had quickly
adopted. The treasures included piles of 1940’s Dandy and Beano comics and
annuals, pre-code American and British Horror comics, and his special delight:
pre-war Gems, Magnets, Nelson Lee and Sexton Blake. I examined these in more
detail on later visits - the kitten I never saw again.

On my
way out after this first visit, we stopped in the main downstairs room, and he
pulled from a pile of books, a 1925 Volume of Forensic Medicine by Harvey
Littlejohn; a technical work illustrated with medical photos of victims of
crime, both murder and suicide. As the winter afternoon waned, and the grey
light faded beyond the one grimy window, Ronnie described in his thin high
voice, the horrors that lay within: the throat slit to the spine until it gaped
like a monstrous nether mouth as the lifeless head lolled back; the many minor
wounds inflicted by the suicide on his throat until he summoned the will to make
the final desperate lunge; the head destroyed by the shotgun in the mouth. As he
recounted, and displayed, these brutal, despairing assaults upon the flesh,
under a single bare bulb, his small eyes glinted, his wet lips collected tiny
gobbets of spittle as his excitement mounted, and for the first time in my
forays into the murky depths of obsession, I felt a tingle of apprehension as my
skin tightened, and I felt a need to get back to the fresh air.

I went
back many times over the next years, and even acquired much later, at inflated
expense, the volume of forensic horrors that Ronnie, the quintessential
Dickensian Fat Boy, had gleefully used to “make my flesh creep” on that first,
unforgettable visit. I got to know him well in the following years, although
getting close to competitive, acquisitive and pathologically suspicious Ronnie
Rouse was not easy, and we had a number of personal disputes (everything was
personal with Ronnie!). I shared his sense of the morbid delights of sex and
death and horror in rancid and twisted combinations; his fascination with
popular culture; and his love of the strange; but most importantly we shared
that feeling of community that only the true collector knows, especially when I
officially joined the ranks by opening my shop in 1985, and welcomed Ronnie,
much to his chagrin, as my second customer; the first was much more sweet
smelling, although equally obsessive , and a great competitor of Ronnie’s – but
that’s another story.

2

"

Lambert, Omaha, Rackheath" –
this cryptic signature, hidden away in the pages of the old “Exchange and Mart”
was the gateway to one of the most fascinating of the legendary collectors and
dealers to emerge from post-war Norwich, and the one who had the greatest
influence on my later career. Until the 90’s, any mention of Norwich at a
collector’s fair, dealing in books, magazines, comics or paper ephemera of any
kind, anywhere in the country would soon elicit enquiries about Tom Lambert. He
was known country wide, and further afield, among the cognescenti, and most
serious collectors had had some dealings with him. Few, however, had actually
met him. He was known exclusively through the pages of the legendary “Exchange
and Mart”; a thick newsprint weekly publication, that consisted entirely of
classified ads, covering every conceivable commodity, collectable and rarity. It
was the bible for collectors, and devoured eagerly every Thursday, as its
devotees trawled through the thousands of columns for that long sought treasure
or bargain. It was the equivalent of the internet today, and the only way that
enthusiasts and dealers from different parts of the country could buy and sell
to each other – it was eBay writ small, but still a mighty engine of commerce
that allowed collectors to grow their collections, and business’s to thrive,
especially the one man enthusiast turned dealer who had a modicum of business
sense.

Tom Lambert was on of these,
and one of the greatest. He was born just before the first world war above a
pub in Lower Goat Lane, and his life before the second World War is very much a
mystery. He seems never to have worked, had no family or friends and simply
belonged to that generation of working class men who struggled through the
inter-war depression years leaving no impression on an implacably grey society.
After the War, still alone, he seems to have moved among the dealers and
spivs who thronged Norwich in that new era when life was hard, old certainties
had been destroyed in the preceding holocaust, and the attitude was to take what
was available from the wreckage of the old life, without too much regard for an
uncertain future. The mayhem of the cattle market in the centre of the city
with the noise of the foam flecked cattle above the shouts of the dealers, as
they prodded and beat the bony flanks with their short thick sticks; the
frantic buying, selling, and general dealing at the packed Corn Hall on Exchange
Street, where among the agricultural goods and implements, would be piles of
boxes of general sale items: random boxes of bric-a-brac; antiques and
furniture; books and magazines, a box of Dicken’s original parts, Tom
remembered, spilling onto the ground to be trampled and kicked in the general
melee.

This was the chaotic scene
that first introduced Tom Lambert to the possibilities of trading in these
un-regarded cast-offs. He would have been joined in these excursions by the ever
curious Ronnie Rouse, another loner, alive to the possibilities afforded by
these undisciplined activities. Ronnie however would bring to the exploration a
genuine collectors instinct for the cultural significance of these objects,
where Tom only saw the commercial possibilities. Their shared interest developed
into an unlikely friendship, until Ronnie’s obsessive competitive instinct drove
them apart, and into a bitter rivalry that lasted until a brief, wary
reconciliation in my shop 30 years later.

By the mid fifties Tom was
living in a tiny flat in Norwich, surrounded by his ephemera, and beginning his
long relationship with The Exchange and Mart, and through it, the outside world.
Within a few years he had moved to his bungaloo at Rackheath – the legendary
“Omaha” – and in another seven it was all paid for; an achievement he was proud
of, all done from the small kitchen with a notepad and pen, and the Royal Mail.
He never saw nor spoke to his customers, there was no emotional involvement
(Ronnie Rouse’s great flaw Tom always maintained), everything was pure business,
and very profitable.

When I first heard about Tom
Lambert he was established and untouchable; a giant among dealers, with a vast
knowledge and a remarkable stock, a hard edged businessman whose word was law
and whose business practises were implacable: he would offer a price if he was
buying, and demand a price if he was selling, and he would not waver by a penny
in either case. He had no sentiment and did no deals, everything was a commodity
and everything had a price. Unlike Ronnie Rouse, who was a familiar
figure around Norwich, and various postcard fairs in other parts of the country,
Tom was never seen in the usual haunts, few people knew what he looked like, and
he never spoke of his business. Every day he would either take the bus, or cycle
on his old upright bike, into the city. He always made for Chaplefield, his
refuge, where he had sat of a bench outside the bandstand or in the shelter for
many years. The only photo I ever saw of Tom as a young man, he was sat on the
same benches, in the same park 30 or more years before. He would mardle with his
cronies and discuss the old days; or get into deep philosophical discussions
about the meaning of life, or the nature of the Universe; and sometimes give a
wise and illuminating tutorial on the nature of collecting and collectors, and
ways of doing business. I know what he spoke about, because his topics were
unchanging, although endlessly fascinating, and I took part in similar
conversations and debates over a number of years, either in his kitchen, or his
wonderfully fecund, rambling garden, an apt metaphor for Tom’s discursive
imagination.

I was told about Tom by Ken,
a great friend and a wonderfully inquisitive, alert little man, who picked up
scents of collections or treasures the way a hunting dog follows a trail,
undetectable to mere mortals. Ken was a man who made things happen by following
leads, engineering introductions, and opening doors; his great tragedy was that
when he had achieved his goal, he had no ability to capitalize on it – he was
too needy, too greedy, he always wanted to “do a deal”, which to him was
synonymous with taking advantage, getting something for nothing. He alienated
all his contacts and friends by his total unreliability; he would take, but give
nothing back unless there was something in it for him. I stuck with him for over
20 years, despite his failings, because I respected his ability to make links,
and because we shared a delight in shady deals and seedy activities. I probably
used him the way he used others, but I gave him friendship and support for many
years, until his final great betrayal of our friendship caused him to reap the
whirlwind; I made sure he got his “comuppance – thrice times filled, and running
over” in a way that broke him; not a thought that now gives me pleasure, and I
miss him to this day, and freely acknowledge the enormous influence he had on
introducing me to the obsessive world of collecting and dealing.

Ken had heard, in his
mysterious way, that Tom Lambert had a vast collection of 16mm films, Ken’s
great passion, and that he was approachable, if it were done with discretion. It
was easy to get Tom’s address from “Exchange and Mart”, but the problem for Ken
was that he didn’t have a car, and so he asked me to take him. I was intrigued
by this reclusive figure, and was glad to lead the expedition to the heart of
darkness that was Rackheath.

As we approached the post
office at the crossroads in Rackheath, a ruddy countryman cycled the other way,
towards the city. Although I had no description of Tom, and knew of no one who
had ever met him, I knew instinctively that this was Tom Lambert, a strange
insight and one I can’t explain, although given the importance of Tom to my life
over the next 15 years, I’m sure he would have recognised the synchronicity
inherent in the moment, as I saw my future in that unremarkable cyclist.

We carried on to Rackheath,
and soon found the heavy brick gateposts adorned with the legend “Omaha” that
led down an overgrown driveway to a slightly rundown, but spacious bungalow.
Tom wasn’t there , which didn’t surprise me, but we did make our first contact
with the enigmatic Velma, Tom’s implacable gatekeeper. She was a thin, middle
aged woman, with a pinched face and watchful eyes; she rarely spoke and had no
discernable personality, but she was fiercely loyal to Tom, and followed to the
letter his instructions to admit nobody. We only managed to communicate with her
through the letter box, and then, only to be told “Tom’s not here”, the only
words anyone can remember her speaking . She lived alone in a flat in the city,
and took the bus every day to spend with Tom. I don’t know how they met, or what
they had in common, except perhaps the need that loners have for an
unquestioning, undemanding relationship that is functional but requires no human
sympathy. Tom had complete trust in her, and was glad for her to guard his
property, and his privacy. In return she had some form of human company, and
over the years she would accompany Tom on long walks through Earlham Park,
although it’s difficult to imagine their conversation. Tom once admitted to me
in his typically honest, unsentimental way, that those walks were often totally
boring, but despite their incompatibility, they stayed together for many years.
On reflection she was probably a good, if limited, woman who gave Tom something
missing from his life. When she died suddenly a few years later, he was
shocked, I think, to find he missed her.

Ken and I
worked out after a few weeks when he was likely to be home, and we finally
turned up at his door to be greeted by the great man himself. Tom was an
unlikely looking bookseller - a big man with the ruddy, weather-beaten
complexion of a farmer; white hair, a white stubble, and clear blue eyes. He
invariably dressed in the summer in baggy corduroy trousers, with workman boots,
a tweed jacket and check lumberjack shirt; in the winter months this outfit
would be augmented by a stained and shabby gabardine raincoat. He moved slowly
and deliberately, and spoke the same way. He was a cautious man, used to his own
company, and wary of strangers. He stood squarely in the doorframe, with one
hand on the handle, as if about to close it, and was very noncommittal
regarding our first enquiries. He was reluctant to engage with us, and may well
have shut the door if Ken had not launched into one of his masterly spiels. He
told him that he had been recommended to come by one of Tom's cronies, a man
called Jack who worked on Tom's garden on an ad hoc basis, and that he had been
told Tom had a collection of 16mm films that Ken was interested in seeing, with
a view to purchase. Tom was always swayed by the prospect of business, and
finally allowed us over the threshold. On that first visit we didn't get further
than the kitchen, but we did establish a bond that we were able to build upon
over the coming months.

Tom's
kitchen was not large and quite sparse: an old cooker and sink; a square deal
table in the middle of the room where Tom carried out all his business; and
assorted piles of papers and magazines ready to be sorted or sent to customers.
At that first meeting Ken did all the talking and he and Tom developed quite a
rapport, something that Ken was very good at developing, especially in the early
days of a relationship. At that time I was very much a bystander; I had no
particular interest in 16mm films, and in all other respects I was an
enthusiastic, but very much an amateur, collector. I had never sold anything in
my life, and was very much a punter: at the mercy of dealers, and to be used for
their convenience. As they talked, Tom became ever more expansive as he relaxed,
and Ken fizzed with energy, enthusiasm and stories: at his best he was great
company andinfectiously raised spirits. They finally got round to
talking business, and Tom heaved himself to his feet, and moved to the large
floor to ceiling airing cupboard that took up half of one wall. He opened the
double doors to their full extent and stood back to gauge our reaction. The
cupboard was racked out with wooden shelves, 7 to 8 feet high, 5 feet wide, with
every bit of space filled with hundreds of reels of 16mm film, in cans and
boxes; 400 foot and 800 foot reels; small boxes of odd sized film; and some
magnificent antique projectors, fabulously rare, and of extraordinary design.
The whole motley assembly was old and dusty, with peeling labels, rust and
cobwebs, and had obviously been accumulated by Tom over years of random
dealings, and then neglected and half forgotten, until the right punter came
along.

We did no
business that first visit, but had established an important relationship, one
that we built over the next few weeks with more visits, in which we gained more
idea of the extent of Tom's vast collection. The kitchen was only the working
space, the other rooms held the bulk of his stock. The large room at the front
of the bungalow was racked out with stout wooden shelving that held 1000's of
magazines: long runs of Victorian and Edwardian cycling and motor trade
magazines; bound volumes, and piles of loose pre-war film magazines -
Picturegoer issues from the 1st world war to the 50's; Picture Show from the
1st issue in 1919; Film Weekly and Film Pictorial; and very rare and short lived
titles like Illustrated Film Monthly from 1913 - 1915. Incredibly rare paperback
histories of the cinema from 1913 and 1914, hardbacks from 1912; boxes and piles
of odd titles and ephemera from the early days of cinema to the second world
war. These were the treasures that excited my interest, but it would be a long
time before I could examine them properly, or hope to do a deal with Tom to buy
them. This room also contained piles of comics from the 30's and 40's: Dandy,
Beano, Sexton Blake, Gem ,Magnet, Wizard and Hotspur, and piles of annuals from
the comic and film world. Tom also had another room which contained even more
extraordinary wonders, but all these were for later days when I could begin to
deal in them myself ; for the moment I was still just browsing, while Ken and
Tom discussed a deal on the film.

The bulk
of the film contained in that cupboard consisted of scores of wartime news
reels from Pathe News and Gaumont British; many odd films from the 40's such as
"Bradman Batting" and other specialist documentaries; one and two reel movies
from 1914 - 17 starring William S. Hart, Tom Mix, and Chaplin, and later two
reelers of Laurel and Hardy from the 1920's. All were fascinating and all were
rare, but the heart of the collection were the newsreels, and this is what Ken
focussed on. Tom stated boldly that he wanted £2000 for everything in the
cupboard, his business philosophy was quite clear: When you buy you state the
price you are prepared to pay; when you sell you state the price you want. The
figure is always realistically worked out and inviolable, that way you always
have control of the deal, and never get involved in counter productive, and time
wasting haggling. A lot of customers think that dealers like to haggle, that
it's all part of the game; I can assure anybody reading this that we don't; it's
not a game, its a business, a living. We can only continue to invest time and
money in the search for interesting items if we have a good idea what we're
going to get for them, and therefore know what we can afford to pay. This
business is as much an art as a science of course, and so there is always
flexibility built in, but time wasting disputes about price, and spurious deals,
are something that the real professional will have no patience with. Any punter
that walks away from a deal thinking he has managed to wear down and put one
over on the dealer, should be aware that he will be remembered (dealers never
forget a bad deal), and any future dealings he may wish to have with that
particular dealer will involve an unspoken, but very real, premium, built into
the price to take account of the inevitable haggling that will ensue; sometimes
that customer will never see some choice items, they will be saved for more
appreciative clients. If you think this is a bit extreme, I can assure that over
the years I have met many customers who have a psychological aversion to paying
the price asked, and will sometimes take their obsession to ludicrous lengths,
as I will discuss later.

We visited Tom a number of
times over the next few weeks, during which time I sorted through Tom’s
remarkable collection of pre-war magazines, while Ken talked film. Tom liked
Ken, as everybody did, and would have done good deals with him, but Ken had a
magpie mind, and could never see a bigger picture than the one directly in front
of him. He could have used his contacts to utilise Tom’s stock for his own
benefit, but he preferred the small deal, with no commitment, and so he lost his
chance; but left the door open for me to eventually take full advantage. But
not yet; first the opening act had to be concluded, and this Ken did in his
usual way. He bought one reel of film off Tom for £15, and took another to be
paid for on the next visit. This was Ken’s normal modus operandi,
but not Tom’s – he didn’t trust easily, but was persuaded by Ken’s transparent
honesty, a part he could play to perfection. When we left that day Ken was
buoyed by the fact that he had got 2 films for the price of one, the only kind
of deal that really excited him, but I was a bit concerned that I didn’t have
more of a personal relationship with Tom, but was only tolerated as Ken’s
friend, which was now looking a more shaky proposition. For some time after
that I asked Ken if he wanted to go back, but he had lost interest: he had
worked one of his famous deals, and now was ready to move on. He knew that he
would never be able to buy all that Tom had, such deals were beyond his
imaginative range, and so the episode with Tom was finished, certainly for him,
and, it seemed, for me as well.

I spent the next few months
pre-occupied with the thought of Tom and his stock, but at this point with no
real idea that I might become a dealer. I was still primarily a collector, and I
wasn’t sure what kind of business I could pursue with Tom, and his vast and
varied stock. I gradually formed the idea of putting together a collection of
every Picturegoer from the 1950’s, something I knew Tom could help with, and
which I could probably afford. I had never visited Tom without Ken, and wasn’t
really sure what kind of response I might get, but finally decided to take the
plunge , and so drove out to Rackheath. I was nervous as I walked round the
back, but glad to see that he was in the kitchen. I knocked on the door and
waited. “What do you want?”, “I was thinking about buying some Picturegoers”,
“Ken owes me £15”. My heart sank at that; I had guessed that he wouldn’t have
forgotten, and that I would be regarded as equally unreliable, and so began the
battle to again win his trust. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I
talked earnestly through the door for a bit, until he finally relented and let
me in. Tom was a wise old bird, and I suspect he had never been entirely taken
in by Ken, but was impressed by my obvious sincerity and love of the books and
magazines. We became friends very quickly, as we talked at length on all kinds
of subjects, and told all kinds of stories. I was always a good listener, and
Tom was a fascinating man with a wealth of knowledge on magazines and comics, a
mine of information on old Norwich, and a penchant for deep discussions on
philosophy, human nature and the cosmos in all its variety, gleaned from his
wide, if superficial, reading. But underlying all this was the constant pulse
of business; dealing was what made his world go round, and our friendship became
deeper, because I was always prepared to enter into deals, often far in excess
of my natural inclinations.

I was still working at this
time, about 1980, and was able to buy regularly, although not in great quantity.
Tom however, as our friendship strengthened, saw ways in which we could both
increase our output. He began urging me to buy, not just for myself, but to
resell at a profit. This wasn’t something I had ever contemplated, but I was
finally persuaded, and so began my entry into the often bizarre world of the
second hand dealer, that has absorbed me for the last 30 years. The first deal I
was offered was a three foot high pile of 1940’s and 50’s Dandys and Beanos.
Tom assured me that they would sell easily, although I was not convinced, but I
took them anyway, and so embarked upon my first ever deal. I was keen to sell
them quickly, and eventually most of them found their way into “Dr Junk”, a
rundown shop in St Gregory’s Alley, whose gloomy interior housed piles of
bric-a-brac, antiques (cameras were his speciality), and assorted paper
ephemera, all watched over by Henry and his mother. Henry Collinson ran a
succession of shops and stalls in the area for some years, a knowledgeable man
in his own field, and always dressed in light coloured suit and waistcoat,
exuding an aura of slightly seedy gentility; an image somewhat subverted by his
mother, a chain-smoking relic who shuffled around in the background to no
apparent purpose.

The ease with which I sold my
first batch, and the thrill of actually making money on comics, gave me a taste
for the deal that has never faded

THE DEALERS

Norman

N

orman Peake took over the old
International Store on St Benedicts in the 60’s, and called himself “The
Scientific Anglian”. After the death of Higgins in 1968 , Norman became the
latest in a long line of eccentric booksellers, who dealt in quantity before
quality, and variety before specialisation. Although he had a scientific
background, and would have a cache of obscure geological titles for specialist
customers, his main stock consisted of 1000’s of books picked up in job lots at
auctions and jumble sales. He would have the odd rare gem, and a vein of
interesting titles in the massive bulk of his stock; but his shop consisted of
two floors piled high with mountains of books, often battered and worn, but
serviceable for the collector, and a treasure trove for the old fashioned
bookworm who would spend hours immersed in the musty mounds of forgotten novels
and unread histories; obscure biographies and esoteric scientific and
philosophical treatises. These were stacked in floor to ceiling shelving that
covered the whole floor space, leaving just narrow alleys to squeeze into, to
search for that hidden gem that might be lurking in his vast inventory. The
books were then stacked up the stairs that led to a top floor that continued the
mad maze of shelving, holding 1000’s more of his battered tomes. The top floor
was where I found my film books, and a couple of strange titles, that I still
have:

Books from his stock are
easily recognised by the large hand written price, enclosed in a square box,
which he inscribed with a flourish inside the book, or sometimes, in the case of
paperbacks, on the front cover, where he would write with such force as to
indent it permanently , and so reduce the value, if it happened to be a
collector’s item. Norman was an scholarly man, and was well aware of genuine
collectors items, but the majority of his stock he regarded from a utilitarian
viewpoint: the books were commodities to be used, not treasured; read and
referred to, but not necessarily kept.

Norman was another of those
strange loners, who suddenly appear on the scene with no history, except what
rumour will provide, and no known human contacts. He was approachable enough, in
a restrained way, but only became really animated when giving lectures in his
powerful barking voice, on some esoteric point of science or bibliography, to
his usually stunned audience, as Norman’s declamatory style brooked no
interruption or contradiction when he was in full flow. Norman himself was a
short tubby man, dressed in shapeless flannel trousers and linen jacket, with
waistcoat or pullover, and grimy shirt. He was bald on top with an unruly mass
of grey white hair at the sides. His whole shabby, careless personage was
embellished with a coating of dandruff, cigarette ash and dust, and he fitted in
perfectly with his stock as he shuffled slowly among the racks. Norman was a
must visit on the circuit of collector’s shops for over thirty years, and never
changed in any way. That was probably his downfall, for the shop became ever
more congested, more incoherent, as Norman aged, and he became less able to
control his ever encroaching stock. This is the case with many dealer/collectors
who accumulate so much material that it seems to acquire a life of its own, and
finally seems to be controlling the collector, and not the other way round. Even
towards the end, I would still see Norman shuffling slowly down the alley from
some charity shop, or fair, with a box of unnecessary, and probably unsellable,
books to add to his already bloated stock. He was finally forced to quit when
his premises were declared a health hazard, after a fire on the top floor, and
closed. Norman was a pleasant enough, if unconvivial, man, and a genuine book
lover and dealer; one eddy in the great unending river of eccentrics and
obsessives who make up this strange business.

Geoff

G

eoff Ives was a dealer in
second hand records who first appeared on the scene around 1960, in a little
shop in Magdalene Street close to The Mayfair cinema. He was an expert in
classical music, which was his main line, and augmented his shop trade with
judicious use of the “Exchange and Mart”. I first began visiting his shop
because he did a good line in speech records, which I began collecting, and jazz
records, some of which I developed a taste for while listening to my brothers
collection when he was out of the house. Geoff was one of those dealers who
worry more about what they are missing, than what they are getting, and later he
would dabble in pop music, when it was offered to him. He was aware that pop
music had a value, but knew nothing about it, and so suffered agonies of
frustration in his inability to determine which records to buy and how to price
them. I was a fairly regular visitor with a friend of mine on Saturday mornings,
and in desperation he would sometimes ask us if a particular record was “any
good”. We took great delight in solemnly informing him thatthe ancient
Frank Ifield single he was debating whether to buy, was an up to the minute pop
hit that the kids would be snapping up. It gave us a something to laugh about
when we left the shop, and a surprising feeling of power, that we knew more
about records than the record dealer. Although he would talk about his records
if asked, he was generally uncommunicative, and in the 30 odd years I knew him
he was always middle aged and lugubrious, although in later years when I opened
my own shop, he would open up to me a bit more, but never too much. In the early
days I think he barely tolerated young people, and probably resented his need to
engage with us, which he had to do, in case he missed a business opportunity. I
was in his shop one day with my mate Mick, examining an LP, when it slipped out
of the cover and bounced three or four times across the floor. We were startled
by this, and expected a tirade from him, but instead, he merely went to the
record, picked it up and examined it, then crossed out the £1 price, substituted
17/6, put it back in the rack and wordlessly resumed his seat. We left the shop,
and idly ruminated on how many times we would have to drop an LP before he would
give it to us for nothing. He later moved to St Giles where he spent twenty odd
years, always middle-aged and slightly morose, ever on the phone to Mrs Ives,
his "pigeon", but always a good stopping off point for the occasional special
find.

THE SUB-CULTURE

B

y the early fifties a small
second hand sub-culture had grown in the little corner shops where small
collectors corners had appeared with the piles of discarded comics and magazines
that had begun to surface after the war, when paper was no longer pulped for
re-use. The Americans had imported tons of comics and pulp magazines that had
been spread around the area, and UK publishers had got in on the act with a
blossoming of comic and pulp publications of their own. These are all now very
collectable, but then were little more than piles of wastepaper, and it was not
uncommon for almost any small shop to suddenly bring out a great pile of these
to be sold off for pennies. Our local shop was Lenny Grint, on the corner of
West End and Waddington Street, and among his usual stock of household
necessities, would often appear a pile of comics beside his counter. I was also
informed by my mother on one occasion that our local chip shop just over Dereham
Road in ….. street, had just brought out a pile of comics, which were piled on
the floor of the shop. I immediately checked them out of course, as did others,
and they were quickly dispersed among the local children, as soon as they could
get a few pence out of parents, and a thriving swapping mania took over the
neighbourhood. Even in those very young days I prided myself upon my superior,
and extensive knowledge of American comics, my particular passion even then.

This ad hoc
arrangement eventually led to small shops in various parts of the city either
opening specifically, or more likely, adapting their existing second hand stock
to this new enterprise. These tiny, dark and dusty, establishments were a magnet
for the inquisitive tyro collector such as myself, and were eagerly sought out
as we ventured abroad. Lou Rogers opened in Heigham street opposite Pickfords
with a generally tatty miscellany of china, low grade antiques, and that all
important paper ephemera. He later moved to St Georges and then Waterloo Road,
but without ever really making a great impression. Others tried the same
business, ……. In rosary Road being another, and a couple of market stalls sold
books, comics and magazines, but the first shop that I really became involved
with, was Barhams at No2 Rampant Horse Street, a small corner shop nestled at
the back of the Haymarket cinema.

My embryonic collecting
instincts were sharpened and developed by the sad fact of my father being unable
to leave his bed. He had developed a taste, which he passed on to me, for the
series of Edgar Rice Burroughs "Tarzan" books, which ran to a considerable
number of titles, and which the local library had proved inadequate to supply. I
had told him that I had seen lots of Tarzan paperbacks through the window of
Barham’s shop, and he immediately formed a resolution to fill in the missing
gaps in our collection. We compiled a list of missing titles from the listings
in the books we already had, and for a number of Saturdays after that, I would
go in the city to visit the shop. The shop was small, with a long, low trestle
table in the middle which was strewn with scores of colourful paperbacks, among
them the desired Tarzan titles. I was never so happy as on those golden Saturday
mornings, sorting through the books with my list in my hand, and the huge
excitement I felt when I found a sought after title, made even more intense when
I could get back home with my acquisition to show to Dad. We would spend the
week reading and discussing the titles I had found, and then, come Saturday, I
would be back to the city to look for more. I very much doubt that we got all
the books we were looking for, but even then I knew that the hunt was as
exciting as the kill, and I have always attributed the birth of my collecting
obsession to those magical days on the corner of Rampant Horse Street, and those
piles of colourful paperbacks.

This random collection of
shops scattered over the city, and various local neighbourhoods, have to be
distinguished of course from more established, secondhand and antiquarian
bookshops, of which there were a number in the city, and which I will speak of
later. These more respectable establishments would normally eschew the
downmarket ephemera that I, and many like me, were becoming obsessed with, and
the way was clear to run a reasonable, though maybe not respectable, business
dealing in working class remnants. The king of these establishments was
Oldham's.

Oldham

O

ldham’s was a small shop, set
in a row in Charing Cross, a few doors up from Duke Street and the public
library. It was a genuinely seedy emporium; one window with a display rack, and
the door on the right which led into the dingy interior, which was small and
dull, the walls shelved for his books, magazines, and comics, and a small
counter behind which stood the proprietor with his various, more exclusive items
on the wall behind him. Arthur Oldham himself conformed perfectly to type: a
rather large, middle aged man in the obligatory baggy suit, somewhat gloomy and
taciturn, and not good at dealing with the young boys attracted by his wares. I
suspect he had a more lucrative trade with other middle aged men, with whom he
could talk and deal more easily than with schoolboys like myself who were drawn
to his shop. Because of his american comics he attracted us in, but he was
always careful we didn't get too close to his adult material.

I was always reluctant to go
in, although fascinated by his window, as he regarded young people with some
suspicion and was never very civil in his dealings with us. I remember in the
early sixties he was approached by two young men who explained they had just
arrived in town for a music gig, and had had their guitars stolen; could he let
them have the guitars in his window for the evening, and they would come back
later and pay for them when they had got their money from the Theatre. They must
have been persuasive, because he agreed, let them take the guitars, and never
saw them again. It got him a good piece in the Evening News that week, but I
don’t think improved his tolerance of young people. The thought that the
redoubtable Oldham had been taken for a ride was a source of some rejoicing
among those of us who had suffered his brusque put downs in the past.

As schoolboys, we always
stopped at Oldham's window when we were in the city; he had a fascinating line
in pin up magazines, and erotic books and publications, as well as comics, and
we were always tempted to go in for a closer look, but rarely dared to. It was
in his window that I first saw copies of "Diana Dors in 3D", "Leslie Carol in
3D", with its tantalizing glimpse of nipple, and various other pocket sized
glamour magazines, including the ubiquitous nudist magazine "Health and
Efficiency" which was smuggled furtitvly into many a bedroom. He also had a
great range of detective and science fiction pulp magazines, which we could
examine, and so I spent a number of happy, albeit uneasy, hours ,in that
slightly dangerous place. By the early sixties I was old enough to happily
browse his stock, and deal with him on equal terms, although still liable to
provoke him , as in the case of "Fanny Hill". "Fanny Hill" is the most
celebrated erotic book in English literature, and in the spirit of the times it
was published in paperback form by Mayflower Books in an unexpurgated version in
1963 at the price of 3/6. It was immediately seized by the police, also in the
spirit of the times, and subsequently banned. The next year it was re-issued in
a censored version by Mayflower, this time at 5/-. This was too much for my
libertarian, thrill-seeking spirit to bear, and I made it my ambition to secure
a copy of the rare 3/6 edition. In Oldham's one day, I saw a copy of "Fanny
Hill" on the wall behind him, but couldn't determine which edition it was. I
asked him how much it was and he told me 10/6, which seemed fair. I then said,
innocently enough, "Is that the edition originally published at 3/6?" He
immediately bristled with outrage, thinking I was accusing him of overcharging,
and ripped the book from the wall, and flourished it in front of me. "This" he
said with ill-concealed contempt, "is cheap at that price", "This" he leered,
"is filthy - the filthiest book you'll ever find". I realised that
bibliographical niceties were not his forte, and rejected the book as soon as I
saw it was the common 5/- edition, leaving him convinced that I was a cheapskate
philistine who had no appreciation of literature. Later in the mid-sixties when
Charing Cross was pulled down, he took up brief residence in St Benedict's
Street, but the business was never the same in an even smaller shop, and he soon
left the scene. He had thrived though for a number of years, despite his
deficiencies in customer relations, and is very fondly remembered by a
generation of 50's schoolboys - not perhaps the epitaph he would have chosen
however.

LENNY

Oldham’s began life as a conventional second hand
bookshop, and was one of the first of the orthodox dealers who recognized the
importance of the new sub-culture that had arisen since the war, and which
would, for a time, virtually swamp mainstream culture. He dealt in comics, film
magazines and music, but I suspect his heart was never really in it; he was of a
generation that had its roots in pre-war society, and was never really easy with
the youngsters and their new enthusiasms. The man who first really sniffed the
zeitgeist was the much loved, and much missed, Lenny Brooker, and to a lesser
extent, his brother Wesley. Lenny was much closer to the right age to appreciate
what was happening, and he took full advantage of it. He was in his 30’s when he
opened his first shop “Jus’ Dandy” in Duke Street in the mid-60’s, and at first
he carried on where Oldham had left off. He sold men’s magazines and glamour
booklets, comics, Detective, Science Fiction and Western pulps, film magazines
and paperbacks. His tiny little shop on the corner of Duke Street and Muspole
Street had a dingy, seedy atmosphere which was endlessly fascinating, but
slightly intimidating, as you stepped down into the gloomy, chaotic interior
where Lenny would be sorting his wares wreathed in cigarette smoke. Lenny was a
thin, dishevelled man, with yellowed tombstone teeth, and a mane of unruly hair
falling over his face, still red in those days, (his wife always called him
“Ginge”), but later mainly grey, although still thick, with ginger streaks.
This first foray into business was a throwback to the fifties ephemera shops and
he was still looking for a proper identity. He changed the name to “Revue Books”
with no more success, but by the early 70’s he had moved to St Benedicts to
dabble in women’s lingery, again unsuccessfully. His final move was to a small
shop in St Giles, close to Crowes bookshop, and where he at last found his
niche. He called himself “Mr Tomorrow” and began to indulge his passion for
comics. His was the first specialist comic shop in Norwich and exploited the
booming market for American imports. He sold all the new titles and built up an
enthusiastic cliental, attracting collectors from the surrounding area, as he
established a thriving business. He never abandoned his other interests though,
and stocked second hand comics and magazines, and his ever present glamour
material. He had at times in Duke Street, and here, utilised his back room for a
little amateur photography, and always had an interesting array of material for
the discerning customer. His most prized possession was a signed photo of Linda
Lusardi which he had pinned up behind his counter, and this was the type of
material he would stock; pornography was never to his taste, he dealt in the
infinitely more desirable B/W glamour publications from the fifties and sixties,
as did Oldham before him. In his first days in the St Giles shop he filled his
walls with a multitude of desirable items, including an original Marilyn Monroe
calendar from a Texas garage, and he was always the shop to visit for those rare
collectables, that no other shop had an eye for. As the main dealer in this
material he was offered the items that established bookshops were at that time
still turning down, and so was able to exploit a virtually virgin field, now
that the other second hand and corner shops had died away. He amassed a
wonderful stock of posters, postcards, magazines and vintage comics, and these
were always the backdrop to his burgeoning comic dealership. He even branched
into a modest publishing venture by getting some of his sixth form and art
college customers to draw their own comics, which he then had printed. His last
name change was to “Comics and Comix” and his shop was a must-visit on the
collectors circuit, which he graced for over 30 years. He was a good, if
unlikely looking businessman, and remained successful despite the encroachment
onto his new comic line by some of the main bookshops. He finally gave up the
business he loved due to ill health, but his interest in his subject never died,
and he will be remembered for a long time by generations of schoolboys who
discovered the joys of comic collecting in Lenny’s tiny shop.

Records

Although recorded music was issued from the twenties in
the form of 78 records, it never became a real collector’s field until the
advent of the 45 single, EP and LP in the fifties. Even then it took the advent
of the first real teenager’s music – Rock’n’Roll – before a market could begin
to develop. In the early fifties the market in second hand recorded music must
have been very small, but for the discerning jazz and blues collector it must
also have been a gold mine, as most of this music only existed on the original,
fragile 78s, and these early collections now often give us the only remaining
example of some historic recordings. Most of these have now all been re-mastered
and re-released on LPs, although many obscure tracks still only exist on the
original vinyl. The generation that grew up just after the war was the first to
have a music dedicated entirely to teenage tastes, and once established, teenage
buying power never let it die. Although the musical idiom may change, the music
has ever since been aimed at a young audience, and what was once a sub-culture
in music became mainstream and all pervasive. As so much of collecting is a
recreation and reclamation of childhood passions, music , which infects
adolescence on such a visceral level, was always bound to become fertile ground
for collectors.

Up until the mid fifties, record shops existed for the
second hand collector, but these were exclusively for the jazz and blues
enthusiasts, and most of the remembered shops were in London, especially Charing
Cross Road, and consisted usually of small basements, or occasionally lofts,
leased from main street shops. All the second hand and collectors shops in
Norwich would have handled odd records, but the only full time establishment was
Ives; and it was not until the explosion of production of EPs and LPs, and the
less fragile singles, with their evocative coloured covers and multi tracks,
that a real second hand market was born. The first wave of genuinely collectable
music arrived in the late fifties, but those first collectors, of which I was
one, were too busy buying the latest records to worry about the previous batch,
which we already had, if we had wanted them.

Customers, Characters and
Collectors

1

I

n one
extreme case, I had a customer who visited the shop a number of times over a
couple of years, and was always prepared to spend. He had a large farm in
the county, no shortage of money and was an avid collector of films and
projectors. I was the only shop in the area dealing in these, and so he could
always find something of interest. His problem was that he would never pay the
asking price, but had to have a deal. It took me a few visits to realise the
extent of his problem, but once I had, I was able to price an item high enough
initially to give him a discount; a silly charade and one that I found
increasingly irksome. On this occasion I had a particularly rare projector
screen, of an unusually large size, and almost impossible to find. I knew he had
been looking for one for ages, and when he came in the shop I prepared for
battle. I showed it to him with some reluctance because I knew it could cause a
problem, and , sure enough, he immediately wanted it.

"How Much?"

I hesitated, because I guessed whatever I said would be rejected, but I was
in no mood that day to play tiresome games. I could have asked an outrageous
price and then come down, but I gave him a chance to break the habit of a
lifetime and be sensible. I offered it to him for the lowest possible price I
could , consistent with its rarity and desirability:

"£40"

He shook his head pityingly

"Oh No, No, No, that's far too much, I couldn't pay that"

"This is really rare - you know that, £40 is cheap"

"It's not worth it, I'd rather wait for another one to turn up"

"You'll wait a long time then, I've never seen one before, and I don't expect
to see one again"

"I'll have it if you drop the price, but I wouldn't pay £40"

"I'm afraid it's no deal then , I can't go any lower"

With that I walked away to talk to another customer, and left him to consider
his position. He wandered around the shop awhile, pretending to look at other
things, but actually trying to find a way out of his self constructed dilemma.
He finally said he had to go, and would I change my mind and lower the price; I
repeated that the price was fair and I couldn't go any lower. He rather
plaintively said " This will be the first time we haven't done a deal, I thought
we could always come to some arrangement". "Maybe another time" I said,
effectively dismissing him. He went to the door, opened it, then hovered in the
doorway, unwilling to leave the screen he so badly wanted, but unable to pay an
asking price, even when he knew it was fair. He looked desperately around the
shop one last time, and his eye alighted on a pile of scratched laser discs
sitting forlornly on a box. "What're they?" he asked "Laser discs, but you need
a special machine to play them". He walked over to them with a lighter step, and
picked up his lifeline. There were only 3 or 4, and completely unsellable, but
he was saved. "Would you include these in the £40?" he asked eagerly. I sighed
inwardly, knowing I was beaten, and agreed. He was immensely cheered, and
obviously relieved, and as he handed over the £40 he picked up his trophies
saying "We always manage a deal in the end don't we? If I ever pick up a machine
these could be really useful",

(or more likely straight in the nearest bin), I thought, but said nothing,
and allowed him his little victory, which meant so much to him.

2

O

ne dull, February afternoon,
the door opened, and in walked another of those odd characters who are so
irresistibly drawn to shops like mine. He was a middle aged man, well dressed in
a mohair overcoat, with velvet collar, striped shirt and tie. He was pleasant
looking, pale fine features, with blue eyes, a neat moustache and fair longish
hair. I would normally have marked him down as a potential customer, and he did
take some general interest in the stock, but then he began to talk, and so I was
drawn into a fantasy world of the kind that many of my customers and
acquaintances inhabit, but rarely so fleshed out and accomplished as this was.

"Do you have anything on
Douglas Fairbanks" he asked in a quiet, educated voice, " I've got some
interesting silent cinema ephemera" I started, but he cut me off, " I was
actually talking about Douglas Fairbanks Junior" he said, "He's my Father you
know". I was a bit taken aback at that, but I never stand in the way of a good
story, and so asked him which of Fairbank's children he was. "Oh you won't find
me in the reference books" he said " I'm his unofficial son". It seemed an
unlikely story, but I resolved to do some research as soon as he had left, and
in the meantime I gave him the floor, and he launched into his fantastical
history. He explained that Fairbanks' wife wouldn't accept him, which is why he
had never been officially recognised, a source of deep hurt to him, but
Fairbanks himself had always treated him well, and allowed him to be part of the
family.

The time of which he spoke
seemed to be the forties and fifties, and he had a cornucopia of memories of the
Hollywood homes, the parties and yachts, and the fabulous names he had mixed
with. He had a wealth of stories of Mary Pickford, who had apparently treated
him very well, and Bette Davis and Joan Crawford among many others. He had gone
on the town as a teenager with Errol Flynn, and been great friends with Tyrone
Power. Although there were sometimes a slightly wistful undertone to the
stories, as he spoke of magical times now lost to him, and the rejection he had
apparently suffered in later years, for most of the time he was immensely
animated as he related his tales with great gusto. He delighted in telling me
the scabrous stories of things he had heard and seen, and the scandalous
activities of the various Queens of Hollywood in their private moments. As he
got into his stride he began to give me the often obscene dialogue in the voices
of the stars themselves, and the voices of Bette Davis, Cary Grant, Bogart and
others brought the racy tales to life as he strode around the shop totally
absorbed in his world of Fantasy or memory, or something in between. I was
captivated by the spectacle and allowed him all the space he needed to develop
his obsessive narrative, wishing to believe, and half inclined to do so, but
increasingly aware of some odd points of interest.

As the afternoon wore on,
luckily with no other customers, I noticed that his overcoat, although of good
quality, was slightly frayed at the cuffs, and his expensive shirt, although
clean, was likewise beginning to fray at the collar. His stories, always
fascinating, and theatrically delivered, were also a bit frayed; as it occurred
to me that they were all stories with which I was already familiar, and had read
before in various film books and biographies. They required a deep knowledge of
Hollywood history, and wide reading and study of the subject, which he obviously
had, but which I had in equal measure, and on reflection later, I realised that
he had told me nothing new, although his bravura performance disguised that at
the time. At the end of his remarkable narrative he seemed to inadvertently
stray into more genuinely personal territory, as he told me of a trip to Paris
with Cary Grant that had not gone well: he spoke of "an encounter", as far as I
could make out, in the washroom, but here he hesitated, and became less clear
"that wasn't good" he murmured, "but that's in the past now". At this point he
stopped, possibly triggering an unwelcome, deeper reality that his more fluent
stories were meant to keep at bay.

He came back a number of
times over the next few weeks, and we talked generally of Fairbanks, and I
supplied him with a couple of books gratis, as he obviously had no money. He
persevered with the illusion of the Fairbanks love-child, but never again spoke
of it with the same depth or intensity; it seemed that he had perhaps unburdened
too much of himself that first extraordinary afternoon, due to the nostalgic
nature of the shop, and my readiness to listen uncritically and sympathetically,
and had now locked it back inside himself.

I didn't see him after that
for a few years, until I passed him in the street a hundred yards from my house,
a neighbourhood he was now living in. We spoke a few words, generalities, and
then parted. What was extraordinary however, was his appearance: gone the
shabby gentility, and in its place a figure of cheerful good health. He was
dressed in white slacks, a checked open necked shirt, with sleeves rolled up,
and looked tanned and fit. I have seen him quite often since, and we often chat,
but no mention is ever made of Fairbanks or that bizarre afternoon in the shop.
He is sometimes with his wife, an attractive, smart woman, and I would doubt
that the day in the shop had ever happened, if it were not for the times I see
him alone: he is always amiable, and we always speak, but sometimes he has a
detached quality, as he stands alone, looking over the neighbourhood at ten in
the morning, with a can of lager in his hand, and who knows what memories,
behind those curiously blank eyes.

PHILOSOPHY

T

he collector is a secretive,
self-absorbed creature who pursues his life's work in the most ordinary places
and gives no outward clue to his obsession. He exists in every walk of life, in
every community and country; he presides over wondrous collections of objects of
sometimes great beauty; great historical or sociological interest; and every
collection they have lovingly fashioned, sometimes over a lifetime, is
different from anything that has existed before. These collections tell a story
about history and culture, often in unexpected and illuminating ways, that can
provoke revelations, and a way of seeing things that enriches our
understanding of the way we live. These are often incidental to the original
purpose of the collection, and not all collections are capable of such a burden;
but real collectors are artists who should be respected and treasured, which is
what I have tried to do. Behind many a suburban door lurks a world of
imagination and wonder, that passers-by could never guess at. In the wilds of
North Norfolk, where beneath the windy, limitless skies that Nelson knew, now
resides a shrine to Audie Murphy, the baby-faced war hero, and western star who
still lives in spirit in a small, unremarkable cottage - to the badlands ofSprowston, where a neat suburban bungalow hides within its anonymous facade a
cornucopia of film and western memorabilia: comics, films, posters, autographs,
books, objects and ephemera that tell the story of a century of culture, all
piled high in shelves, and on tables; boxes and racks, and displayed on walls
and in cabinets in a colourful extravaganza that bewilders the eye and
stimulates the imagination. And in the middle of this stands the collector;
ordinary in many ways perhaps, easily overlooked by those who do not understand
his ways, but a repository of knowledge and memory and often, wisdom, that
could be the gift of all, if they only had his instincts. They are scholars and
philosophers, but without the ability to communicate what they know, except to
fellow enthusiasts. And so they pass anonymously in the crowd - the unsung and
unrecognized dreamers.

Collecting as
an art form is an idea that has finally been absorbed by society at large:
previously collecting was the preserve of the wealthy and well connected, and
for centuries the major collections of books, paintings, furniture and antiques
have been kept within the great families. In the 19th century the fortunes made
out of the industrial revolution led to more collections being compiled by the
mega rich industrialists and eccentrics, who continued the process of ransacking
the world of fine art and antiquity. Although many of these collections have
since become museums, they were essentially the creation of the elite for the
elite, and so hidden from the majority of the population.
The last few decades however, have seen a huge change in the kind of people who
collect, and what they collect. The entertainment industry and the consumer
society has fuelled a huge interest in the artifacts that surround us, and make
up the world we live in; the ability of TV and the movies to preserve what was
previously ephemeral has led to an obsession, based on nostalgia for the world
we used to know, and the world our parents knew: the 20th century has become the
antiquity that we now ransack, and every one of us has the ability to travel
the world courtesy of the internet and bring back those elusive prizes that form
the new 21st century collections.

These collections are very different from the great collections of the past, and
formed by very different collectors; but what hasn't changed is the ability to
see what is important and culturally valuable; the ability to make connections
between what seem to be disparate objects and to form them into a pattern that
can make sense out of the bewildering array of information and objects that make
up the society we live in. A real collection is more than just an accumulation
of objects, and quantity is no guide to its value and purpose. Many people have
lots of items in their possession, but these are no more a collection than a
supermarket shelf is a meal: it takes a collector to sort and chose and combine
in such a way that something is revealed, created even, that was not there
before: a collection is more than the sum of its individual parts.

A
collector is born, not made (I won't elaborate on Freud's theory on this - most
collectors are familiar with the "anal" jibe that comes our way), and formed by
an initial interest, experience, and curiosity about why we feel the way we do
about certain things that have coloured our lives since childhood, and which we
are reluctant to abandon. A collector works at his passion: we spend years
scouring junkshops, jumble sales, auctions and antique shops; sometimes we buy cheap,
sometimes we dig deep (no collection is formed on the cheap, there are times we
all pay more than we should, but money is transient, the pleasure of owning that
special item is forever); collectors learn all the time - our research takes us
into unexpected areas, and we are always adding more to the jig saw that makes
up our own unique version of the world. Collectors add to the sum of human
knowledge, informing the rest of society about the patterns and trends that lie
behind the otherwise fragmented memories and feelings they have about their
lives - the past is a living, palpable entity that lurks just out of sight to
most people, but which still affects everything they feel about their lives -
collectors bring it into the light and reveal what had been long forgotten by
the conscious mind but still stirs in the darkness of the sub-conscious.

Collectors have one further important function that adds immeasurably to the
wealth of the nation: we are the modern alchemists, we have discovered the
secret of turning base metal into gold. We take an unregarded, unremarked item
that would otherwise be discarded, and reveal it as a valuable, often revered,
treasure that makes money (sometimes a great deal of money) for the original
owner, and thereafter becomes part of the fabric of the country for future
generations to admire and learn from. Collectors nurture their collections and
guard them until the time comes for them to pass into other hands; but however
many times over the years they are broken and re-formed in different ways,
however much they increase or decrease in value, each individual item will
still in some way bear the imprint of the collector who first recognised its
true worth and saved it from oblivion: we are important - we are
immortal.

One final thought:

Consider "Citizen Kane" as the story of a collector manqué: he is haunted by the
demons of his childhood and seeks an answer in accumulating a mountain of
collectable artefacts; but he is not a collector, he sees no meaning or pattern
in the things he acquires, (an accumulation is not a collection remember ); the
meaning was there - but only a born collector could have found it.